A federated intelligent product environment

The concept of a federation of distributed devices on a network which enter the federation through a process of discover and join, by which they register with a service request broker and publish the services which they perform is applied to engineering software tools. A highly flexible computer architecture is developed, leveraging emerging web technologies like Sun Microsystems' Jini TM , RMI, JavaSpaces, in which engineering software tools like CAD, CAE, PDM, optimization, cost modeling, etc. act as distributed service providers and service requestors. The individual services communicate via so-called context models, which are abstractions of the master model data of a particular product. A human user interacts with the framework through a thin client like a web browser from anywhere in the world, where proper security measures to prevent unauthorized access to proprietary data is maintained. The paradigm of the CAD Master Model is extended with the introduction of the Intelligent Master Model (IMM), which, in addition to the what, captures the why and how of a design through the use of knowledge-based engineering tools. An initial example, the mechanical analysis of a turbine engine blade, is implemented.