Abstract
Summary form only given. The National Science Foundation (NSF) established an Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) for e-Design at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the University of Central Florida. The center serves as a national center of excellence in information technology (IT)-enabled design and realization of discrete manufactured products. It is currently supported by a growing number of US industry partners and US government agencies including GEAE, Ford Motor Co., Alcoa, Pratt&Whitney, Lockheed Martin, PTC, ANSYS, Raytheon, Respironics, BAE Systems, IBM, Engineous Software, VirtualE3D, and the federal agencies, including DoD, NIST, and NASA. Two additional universities, Carnegie Mellon University and Virginia Tech, join the center. Through four research thrusts, (1) enabling information infrastructure, (2) life-cycle, collaborative, and multidisciplinary design, (3) conceptual design tools and design process models, and (4) virtual prototyping and simulation, more than 30 faculty members along with their graduate students are conducting research activities to realize the innovative e-design paradigm. This demonstration presents the Pegasus gateway that enables a collaborative service-oriented design paradigm with capability for interoperability, trust-support infrastructure, systems engineering approach to design, integrated product realization through optimization, transparency, conflict resolution&negotiation, pro-activeness of analysis, virtual simulation&prototyping, lean product data management, multidisciplinary constraints&preferences capturing, and instant distributed access&visualization. As a case scenario, this demonstration shows how the Pegasus gateway can be efficiently employed in collaboration for assembly design. The Pegasus gateway and service-oriented collaboration architecture realizes an environment in which joining knowledge is captured early in the assembly design process and is propagated seamlessly and transparently to downstream activities including virtual assembly analysis and assembly design decision-making.