Towards a Decision-Based Distributed Product Realization Environment for Engineering Systems

Abstract

Abstract We imagine a future in which geographically distributed engineers collaboratively develop, build, and test solutions to design-manufacture problems encountered in the product realization process. In this context, we want to provide a foundation to support the realization of industrial products for a global marketplace through distributed design and manufacture. Specifically, we want to provide a platform-independent framework to integrate distributed and heterogeneous software resources to support the computationally intensive activities in the product realization process, anchored in the philosophy of decision-based design. In this paper, we present a prototype platform-independent framework based on an experimental version, called P2, of the Sandia Product Realization Environment (PRE). We describe the implementation of this framework to design and prototype gear transmissions using commonly available software assets.