Weaving a semantic grid for multidisciplinary collaborative design

This paper describes a preliminary attempt at weaving a Semantic Grid for multidisciplinary collaborative design over the internet. An ontology-based service-oriented modelling approach is proposed for distributed management of multidisciplinary design knowledge, through which, various Grid services for distributed applications are annotated with domain resource ontology to facilitate their autonomous deployment, reuse and federation in multidisciplinary collaborative design in a meaningful and flexible way. A service-oriented multi-agent system architecture is laid out in the peer-to-peer network of a distributed, scalable, semantic service registry to address, in an open, decentralised and loosely coupled manner, the life cycle of multidisciplinary collaborative design activities involved in publishing, discovering and reusing various Grid services efficiently. An intelligent service-oriented workflow planner equipped with an ontology- and rule-based problem-solving strategy is devised to support the users in constructing the workflow of a complex engineering design process from existing multidisciplinary design resources automatically, utilising their semantic descriptions. An example in applying the proposed approach to a multidisciplinary collaborative design of metal stamping progressive die is presented to illustrate the potential application of the workflow planner in the Semantic Grid.