A distributed, heterogeneous computing environment for multidisciplinary design and analysis of aerospace vehicles

A framework for rapid applications development is described that implements an object-oriented computational environment in which the Common Object Request Broker Architecture and the Java programming language are used to encapsulate discipline codes as reusable "objects". The environment exploits the parallelisms inherent in the application and distributes the disciplines on machines most appropriate to their needs, while insulating the developer and the user from the complexity of the underlying communications constructs. Data and file management are accomplished using Java's database connectivity to access a commercial relational database management system. Java's Beans Development Kit (BDK) is used to implement the disciplines and sub-tasks as reusable components and to provide a graphical interface for user input as well as to facilitate interactive and visual object connectivity and monitor problem execution progress. The advantages of this approach have been demonstrated through the implementation of a standalone aerodynamic optimizer and the analysis of a large-scale high speed civil transport design optimization problem in this framework. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.