Meeting the Audi challenge

Back to index page

Previous article: GSoC Students

Next article: Expert advice on open source

At a recent workshop hosted by Audi, IT Innovation demonstrated to major automotive companies and technology suppliers how GRIA and OGSA-DAI can help support collaborative product design.

Audi challenged different IT vendors to develop and demonstrate solutions to a complex engineering design scenario including CAE (Computer Aided Engineering), CAD (Computer Aided Design) and external consultant engineering teams. Significant business and technical challenges had to be tackled including, management and process coordination between distributed teams, loose data integration between product and simulation data-management systems, integration of third-party suppliers, and sharing data securely with partners using the Internet while considering operational security and data risk assessments.

To meet these challenges, a service-oriented infrastructure was developed by IT Innovation, MSC Software, Ontoprise and Fhg-SCAI. Commercial, off-the-shelf, data-management solutions from MSC Software and Ontoprise were integrated with open-source security, management and data-access services to govern inter-domain design and simulation processes. A key aspect of the scenario was outsourcing CAD meshing tasks to third-party engineering consultancy companies. The benefits of outsourcing specialist capabilities are well known (improved innovation, reduced costs, increased flexibility) and automotive companies are increasingly looking to exploit the Internet and Web Services when outsourcing in collaborative design processes.

The infrastructure used semantic technologies to provide integration between the different data models and product configurations required by each team. Semantic representations of CAD and CAE data were developed by Ontoprise and used with OntoBroker™ to exchange data between domains. Data access was achieved using GRIA's OGSA-DAI service, which provided a consistent data access layer to different data-management systems and the semantic layer. OGSA–DAI was selected for data access and integration due to the rich support for file access, database access and delivery mechanisms, its extensible architecture and open-source licence. OGSA-DAI is fully committed to following open standards such as the WS-DAI specifications from the Open Grid Forum, and therefore meets a key requirement for inter-enterprise integration.

MSC and Ontoprise exploited the extensibility of OGSA-DAI’s activity architecture by creating activities that model the Semantic Mediation between CAD and CAE engineering data. Combining the OGSA-DAI access model with GRIA’s service-provider management package, allowed engineering teams in different organisations to interoperate and constrain access to distributed project data using SLAs and policy rules.

The infrastructure was deployed at sites throughout Europe and demonstrated live at the Audi workshop. The demonstration showed how GRIA and OGSA-DAI can accelerate supplier integration by coupling standardised data access with B2B procurement processes that incorporate automated, service-level agreements and dynamic trust and security.

Mike Boniface, IT Innovations.

www.tinyurl.com/5hympg