Research And Implementation Of Model Base Management System Based On High-level Modeling

Currently, the prevailing technology of product design and simulation is still for single field. The technology based on various CAx (CAD, CAM, CAE, etc.) or DFx (DFA, DFM, DFC, etc.) has already received many research results and been applied successfully. However, it is far from the requirement of market with more complex product which has complicated customer requirement, complicated product components, difficult production techniques, complicated manufacturing process, especially, is involved multi-fields. In this paper, a collaborative simulation platform with high-speed interoperability to integrate those exiting CAx or DFx tools is presented.The platform supports a 3-tier architecture which consists of clients at front end, application servers at the middle, and a network of computing resources at back-end including DataBase. The most essential difference from the general 3-tier architecture based on TCP/IP protocol is that another data interaction based on HLA/RTI is used. The communication among computers is through network based on TCP/IP while the real-time simulation is realized through HLA interfaces using the RTI. The HLA- compliant simulation supports high-level modeling which is an efficient object-oriented design methodology which significantly reduces the complexity of constructing models.The collaborative simulation involves many scientific fields, such as electronics, mechanics, cybernetics and etc. Its components are complex, distributed and interactive so that the models must be heterogeneous, accordingly, it will be much difficult to organize and manage them. The design and implementation of the model base management system (MBMS) for high-level model are mainly studied in this paper.The MBMS we developed is based on files so that it is convenient to describe a complex system. But there is an essential difference between the file system and the MBMS. The models and data have relations with each other in the MBMS whereas the files have not any relations with each other in the files system. That is to say, the MBMS manages not only models but also the related data and documents.The high-level modeling is object-oriented and hierarchical modeling so we organize and manage models hierarchically. Three levels of models are used: Element Models (EM),...