Engineering information integration and application development using object-oriented mediator databases

Sammanfattning: The thesis deals with methods for efficient integration of engineering information sources, such as CAD and CAE systems, and application development in the product development process. The distributed and heterogeneous engineering computing environment of today does not provide sufficient interoperability between CAD and CAE systems. The development of engineering information systems can provide interoperability and a environment for a effective exchange of information. However, if not the proper methods and technologies are used the systems may be costly to develop and their use can be limited. It is therefore of importance to find methods and technologies for efficient development of engineering information systems that meet the requirements of the product development process. The use of mediator technology for information integration and application development can be used to overcome the information exchange limitations by providing integration primitives, distribution, memory management, object- oriented data modelling, and query language. It also provide efficient management of data in terms of performance. The use of a declarative query language for application development shows great potential in development productivity and ease of use. The present work presents methods for how to use mediator technology for engineering information integration and effective application development. Studies of a multidisciplinary simulation process have given important insights into the needs for efficient application development and how information in engineering systems should be integrated. It was found that techniques for distributed computing such as CORBA provides means to access engineering information and computational procedures. Further, the technology provides descriptions of the interfaces and a standardised protocol that allows interaction with the engineering system through remote messages over the network. This has been utilised to develop a method that enables a semi-automatic integration of the data and the functionality of CAD and CAE system with object-oriented mediator system. It is believed that the findings enables a more effective information exchange and application development in the engineering analysis process. The methods and tools have been verified in prototype systems for querying CAD information and for the development of a vehicle dynamics simulation system. The use of these engineering information system removes a great deal of manual work concerning data management which the engineers would otherwise have to perform.