Active Catalogs

Active Catalogs is a 3-year research project that will, by providing behavioral aspects of online information, significantly enhance the engineering and design support that is desirable but beyond the reach of current engineering environments. It will realize a new "Try Before You Buy" paradigm in the electro-mechanical engineering domain, and will facilitate a wide range of activities from information discovery, to information evaluation, and to information consumption.

It is a synergy of wide spectrum of research issues: knowledge representation, knowledgebase and database integration, digital library, information retrieval, electronic commerce, and electro-mechanical design. The project is just starting its first year.

Objective:

To facilitate engineering electro-mechanical design by providing a seamless flow of information discovery, information evaluation, and information consumption to the engineer. The environment will bring dynamic and behavioral information into the design environment as well as provide better functionally-oriented search via description. The engineer will find and pull down models and design fragments from the Net, incorporate them into a possibly distributed, simulation and try the systems before placing orders or committing to the manufacturing/acquisition phase.

Approach:

To construct a rich ontology (taxonomy, terminology, and semantic net) of a subdomain within electro mechanical design. This ontology will be used by designers to specify their semantic/functional description of the needed information. Also, the ontology will be used by a discovery system during its searching for the information.

Implement a core set of behavioral models including transfer functions, kinematics and dynamics descriptions and a variety of modes of interactive simulations. These models and environments will enable the user to evaluate the design by interactively modifying parameters and observing changes in the system behavior.

Define and implement interfaces of the behavioral models that follows the standard set by Open Model Forum to allow integration of the models.

Implement viewers and simulators that facilitate examinations of various aspects of pieces of design subset or other information.

Implement a set of mediators to form the basis to integrate a collection of PC-based tools for engineering design and mathematical computation.

Integrate above components to realize a seamless information flow in an integrated engineering environment.

Progress:

Although the project is not yet on contract, we have already implemented a core ontology for pump systems as may be used in Simulation Based Design (SBD) of ships. The ontology has been integrated into a information discovery component (a separate effort at ISI supported by ARPA). A simple example has been implemented that demonstrates the concept of bringing a simulation model to a simulation tool (Working Model) based on functional descriptions defined by domain terminology.

Products:

None

FY95 Accomplishments:

Although the project is not yet under contract, several modeling systems have been investigated and some have been acquired. The main result of the initial investigation is that we have decided to use PC based tools. These are cheaper and better integrated than those in the Workstation environment. They also have more potential users and better technology transfer potential.

The work so far has been expended in building an ontology and simulation model for pumps. This domain arose from meetings with Lockheed and The University of Utah in the context of an ARPA/MSTO potential project in SBD (Simulation Based Design) .

Publications:

None.

Date Prepared:

July,5,1995

FY96 Events

Construct models for parts/components in whatever (electrical or mechanical) modalities necessary;
Integrate the models and realize data sharing between the models;
Build:

an initial catalog supporting retrieval of active data base on functional description;
tools to view the data and to run the simulations;
interface to DASHER, an electronic commerce system;

Deploy the initial catalog to SBD.

Technology Transition

Active Catalog is a new project and has not transitioned anything yet. However, technology transition will occur as early as the first year. As part of the technology transfer effort, a subset of the research product will be deployed in a Lockheed SBD environment. Autodesk, a major CAD vendor, is also interested Active Catalogs in potential collaboration and in exploitation.

The impact of the work will be measured by increase in re-usability of design, by decrease in time to market/delivery, and by user feedback.

Major key technologies to be exported in the initial phase are: functional-based retrieval of parts, simulation models, and an interface to electronic commerce system.

Quad Charts

PowerPoint (4.0 for Windows) file is available here

Schedule:

Summer 95 - Summer 96

Core models for multi-modalities constructed
Prototype interface to electronic commerce system
Initial catalog with "Active" data, viewers, & simulators

Summer 96 - Summer 97

Integration of models of different modalities
Deployment to SBD
Prototype metrics for closeness of fit to queries

Summer 97 - Summer 98

Tool integration
Extended domain
Deployment to other sites

Background /History

Background/Motivation:

Product cost and quality depend on correct design decisions
A good understanding of design issues is crucial for decision making
appropriate representations are necessary for a good understanding

It is recognized that final product cost is critically dependent on choices made early in the design cycle. To arrive a good design early, the designer needs tools to support this early design activity. Although such support exist in VLSI Design, where the design space is highly structured with many representation schemes each with its specific simulator and all connecting hierarchically (physical level, gate level, register, and system), the mechanical domain is much poorer in representation and structure especially in hierarchical decomposition. Furthermore, it is not clear that such a hierarchical decomposition is even possible in mechanical systems and thus the field will forever be compelled to work within the paradigm of interoperating disjunct models and simulation systems across a wide modalities of technologies.

The mechanical domain is currently characterized by having a broad multi-discipline set of simulators and constraints which have not been structured into a cohesive whole. They must work in breadth across such disciplines as thermal, kinematic,and dynamic domains since in real world, often, slight changes in one dimension have profound implications in another associated domain. Multiple interacting simulations of the different modalities may be the only way short of building a prototype of ensuring that the entire design has integrity.

The designer needs easy access to the rich set of models and simulations.

Driving Force:

Peter Will's experience as Director of HP Design Systems;

Research paper in Engineering Design Journal: "Simulation and Modeling in Early Concept Design: An Industrial Perspective" by Peter Will, 1991;

Paper in NSF/XEROX Workshop on Information Capture and Access in Engineering Design Environments: "Design Information Handling" by Peter Will, 1991;

Chapter in IMPROVING ENGINEERING DESIGN by National Research Council: "Designing for Competitive Advantage" co-authored by Peter Will, 1991;

Information Technology in Manufacturing, NRC Study, Peter Will chairman, 1995.

Technical Approach:

Study representation modalities used in electro-mechanical design

Construct and integrate models

Buy/extend/integrate existing and construct new viewers and simulators

Deploy and test the system in the context of a real domain of interest to ARPA, electro-mechanical design or SBD.

Objectives / Benefits:

Better Design:

enable coherent view of kinematics, transfer function and dynamic effects.

Faster Design:

Increase design re-use to cut time to market and enable wider design space exploration.

New Design Paradigm:

"Try Before You Buy".

Rapid Deployment:

Enhancement of Lockheed's SBD environment, possibility of linking to Autodesk's Part and Materials Library, potential to connect Autodesk to DASHER electronic commerce system,which is the successor of FAST.

Technical Challenge and Key Ideas or Concepts:

Modality of models, simulations, and presentations (no standard for describing the wide spectrum of part characteristics)

Data exchange among the models describing one part and different parts (Data sharing among different models is still a new area, e.g., Open Model Forum, and there is a strong need for searching for solutions.)

Consistency among models at runtime

Validity of the modalities, models, and simulations

Potential business model: "Pay Only When You Use" in "Try Before You Buy" paradigm

Active Catalogs will not be able to solve all these problems. It will contribute to the solution.

Due to technology problem, we cannot display the posters as inline images.
Poster displayed during CSTO PI meeting, Fort Lauderdale, FL, July 1995 (in PowerPoint 7.0 for Windows 95 file is available here)
Poster displayed during DTII PI meeting, Sunnyvale, CA, January 1996 (in PowerPoint 4.0 for Windows file is available here)

Anonymous FTP (PowerPoint4.0 files for Windows): Picture and schdule.