| As engineering evolves from largely in-house design, validation, and production processes to an interlinked network of global designers, manufacturers, and integrators, it becomes necessary for the engineering processes involved to change as well. Companies are migrating from being product manufacturers to product integrators, combining a large number of engineering subsystems designed and manufactured by their supply base. Additionally, product integrators are coming to rely heavily on those suppliers for the design and model information required to make their integration a success. Currently, this requires the time and effort to reformulate and revalidate the subsystem models into a global model of the product. In addition, suppliers are hesitant to give their models to the integrators, without binding legal agreements to protect the proprietary information contained within their subsystem models. The fixed input/output structure the modular modeling method provides eliminates the need for global model reformulation and revalidation. The distributed, agent-based architecture of the i-EDA system allows companies to focus on their core competencies, and to have access to model information at any time, and from any place. In addition, the synthesis of the two concepts provides a method for communicating dynamic models in a manner that conceals the proprietary information contained within them. This work details the implementation of the modular modeling method within the i-EDA framework to assemble and solve a class of dynamic system models over the internet. Examples are given from structural mechanics. |
