Grid-based collaborative simulation system for vehicle crashworthiness

Globalization and increasing market competition are forcing the automotive industry to develop technology that will enable more efficient collaboration between carmakers and their suppliers. One of the options that can meet this demand is to adopt grid technology in the collaboration process. For the system to be successfully applied, the trust relationship among Virtual Organization (VO) members becomes a very important factor. Systems lacking in secure mechanisms require all the collaborating members to fully trust each other, and thus make their application quite limited. Based on grid technology, this paper proposes a collaborative simulation system for vehicle crash safety design, and discusses the trust relationship among VO members. The grid middleware VEGA and web services working for the collaboration also contribute to the simulation system. Also, a test bed is set up on the basis of the Local Area Network (LAN). At the end of this paper, a real case involving a carmaker and a door supplier is presented to demonstrate how the grid-based collaborative simulation system works. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.