Using distributed programming in collaborative design and production system management.

Cioca, Marius ; Cioca, Lucian Ionel

Abstract: The use of information technology is indisputed in any direction, starting with medicine, education, research, production, socially, etc. Taking into account what we have just said before, the present paper presents an original method of using distributed programming with the purpose of obtaining products based on the principle of collaborative design and of sustaining the management of the production systems, thus improving its performances, and, at the same time, increasing those of the triple requirement quality-cost-time, which, in a global economy, has an overwhelming importance.

Key words: distributed programming, production system

1. INTRODUCTION

The article's purpose is the presentation of a virtual informatics environment that would ensure the improvement of the cooperation and of the operative communication between the members of a team formed, for a limited time period, for the realizing of a high complexity project. More concretely, it targets the virtual product design by a team from the University and partners from the industry, on the one hand for the shortening of the time needed for realizing the product and on the other hand for the knowledge exchange between pluridisciplinar teams (for a better connection between the higher education and the business environment from the area of Sibiu). Also, the promotion of ISO/STEP, standards is sought and encouraged, as well as their inclusion in new instruments as support for concurrent engineering. The application packages offered by the university are: ProENGINEER, Solid Edge, IDEAS, Unigraphics, CATIA, AutoCAD, by means of the Centre for Research and Implementation of Numerical Methods (CCIMN). CCIMN is the only centre in the Sibiu area acknowledged as Training Centre in the application packages Edge, Unigraphics and I-DEAS.

2. THE PRESENT SITUATION IN ROMANIA

In Romania, the topic delt with in the paper (the necessity of collaborative programming) appeared, on one hand, due to the very high costs of the assisted programming media, such as AutoCAD, CATIA, ProEngineering etc, and on the other hand, due to the imperious necessity to come on the market with quality products, at low costs and in very short periods of time, which cannot be done without a cooperation between the partners in the field of programming, such as industry, education, research. Thus, we describe the GRID technology (point. 3), principle on which the IT infrastructure will be developed (point 4), necessary to achieving collaborative programming and increasing the performances of the production management systems (Cioca, M., Cioca, L. 2005).

3. GRID TECHNOLOGIES

3.1. Introduction

In order to solve these cooperation difficulties, and to create an actual system, our proposal is based on using Grid technologies. This section contaions a short presentation of the most important details regarding the Grid methodologies and applications. At the same time, we shall provide a few definitions and possible classifications of the Grid platforms, and we list the obstacles and the different areas of research.

According to (Abbas, A. 2004), Grid computing--a new concept of the future IT generation--makes possible the distribution, the selection and the junction of the heterogeneous resources globally distributed for solving issues, widely spread in some interest areas, or for testing the access to data, information and knowledge.

The resource management within the production systems and the predictions in the existent media, is a complex activity. The geographical distribution of the resources owned by organizations having different policies, costs and capacities is ambiguous. The producers (the owners of the resources) and the consumers (those who use the resources) have different goals, objectives, strategies and needs.

In order to cope with these challenges, a systematical approach should be adopted in order to reshape and reuse certain resources. A system that will control the available knowledge should offer possibilities for creating, changing, storing and recuperating information in a neutral format used in the field of assisted design, more precisely STEP (point. 4.2) which can be easily used by all the partners participating to the collaborative programming (Shadbolt, N. et al, 2006).

3.2 Grid Computing: a General Presentation

The actual Internet technologies' opportunities have led to the undreamt possibility of using distributed computers as a single, unified computer resource, leading to what is known as Grid computing (Abbas, A. 2004). Grids enable the sharing, selection, and aggregation of a wide variety of heterogeneous resources, such as supercomputers, storage systems, data sources, specialized devices (e.g., wireless terminals) and others, that are geographically distributed and owned by diverse organizations for solving large-scale computational and data intensive problems in science, engineering and commerce.

According to (Alboaie, L., Buraga, S. 2003), different definitions of what Grid computing represent are available:

1. The flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions, and resources.

2. Transparent, secure, and coordinated resource sharing and collaboration across sites.

3. The ability to form virtual, collaborative organizations that share applications and data in an open heterogeneous server environment in order to work on common problems.

4. The capability to aggregate large amounts of computing resources which are geographically dispersed to tackle large problems and workloads as if all the servers and resources are located in a single site.

5. A hardware and software infrastructure that provides dependable, consistent, pervasive, and inexpensive access to computational resources.

6. A way of processing distributed information available on Web.

One of the most used definitions is provided by (Buyya, R. 2002): "Grid Computing enables virtual organizations to share geographically distributed resources as they pursue common goals, assuming the absence of central location, central control, omniscience, and an existing trust relationship".

Virtual organizations can span from small corporate departments that are in the same physical location to large groups of people from different organizations that are spread out across the globe. Virtual organizations can be large or small, static or dynamic (Filip, F.G. 2004).

A resource is a shared entity available in the Grid. It can be computational, such as a personal digital assistant (PDA), laptop, desktop, workstation, server, cluster, and supercomputer or a storage resource such as a hard drive in a desktop, RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks), and terabyte storage device. Other types of resources are the I/O ones: sensors, networks (e.g., bandwidth), printers, etc. Within a Grid, logical resources are also available: users, time counters and others.

Absence of a central location and central control implies that Grid resources do not involve a particular central location for their management. The final key point is that in a Grid environment the resources do not have prior information about each other nor do they have pre-defined security relationships.

Related technologies to Grid computing are peer-to-peer network architectures, cluster computing and, of course, Internet/Web computing.

4. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

The architecture of the system for collaborative work takes into account:

* the type of process interaction function of the time: synchronous or asynchronous;

* the geographical dispersion of the virtual team's members: local or distant.

4.1. IT infrastructure

Basically (Daconta, M.C., Obrst, L.J., Smith, K.T., 2005), a new (virtual) network is created over the interconnected networks. In this network formed of several computing systems, one is a server designated by consensus and put at the disposal by the university. The infrastructure allows the saving of drawings (via the STEP AP203/214 standard) (Sheth, A. et al., 2003) in a joint database from which the team members can access these drawings (reverse conversion; from the STEP format in the native environment used) and process them further. The "guest" that has access to the realized models can visualize these drawings in VRL format.

4.2. Technical design

With regard to the structure of a STEP (STandardised Exchange of Products) type file, a database with primitives and geometrical models is built, that in the end will be used in the generation-modeling application, based on a sum, a series of predefined or previously created objects. General characteristics

The STEP (***) structure is very facile. In essence, a number of constructors is used (presented below). These constructors are usually well-known geometrical shapes. The coordinates or the geometrical constructor's position is also well known, existing the possibility to indicate it as absolute value or as a reference to an entity (usually a point) which was previously determined. This connecting generates a structure, a network of points that can act in the following as a system, if translations and/or rotations are desired.

STEP Entity, Cartesian Point, Line, Circle, Ellipse, Parabola, Hyperbola, PolyLine, Composite Curve, Trimmed Curve, Bspline Curve, Plane, Cylindrical Surface, Conical Surface, Spherical Surface, Toroidal Surface, Surface of Linear Extrusion, Surface of Revolution, B-spline Surface, Rectangular Trimmed Surface, Curve Bounded Surface, Offset Surface, Manifold Solid Brep, Shell Based Surface Model.

5. CONCLUSIONS

Without a pluridisciplinary approach in a modern domain located at the crossroads of production systems and communications, any enterprise is bound to fail, on a globalised market where the quality-cost-time factors become ever more demanding. Also, open-source web technologies need to be considered that dramatically reduce costs and that have assured their supremacy through flexibility, maturity and platform independence. Therefore, they are recommended in the virtual product design process using different CAD/CAM systems in distributed environments, technologies such as the Apache web server, the application server PHP, Java and the database server MySQL run on a UNIX platform (Miles, A., Brickley, D. 2005).

6. REFERENCES

Abbas, A. (2004), Grid Computing: A PracticalGuide to Technology and Applications, Charles River Media

Alboaie, L., Buraga, S. (2003) "tuBiG--A Layered Infrastructure to Provide Support for Grid Functionalities", Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing, IEEE CS Press

Buyya, R. (2002) "Economic-based Distributed Resource Management and Scheduling for Grid Computing", PhD Thesis, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Cioca, M., Cioca, L. (2005) "Multi-criterion Analysis of Reference Architectures and Modeling Languages used in Production Systems Modelling", 3rd IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics, Perth, Australia, ISBN: 0-7803-9094-6

Daconta, M.C., Obrst, L.J., Smith, K.T. (2005) The Semantic Web, John Wiley & Sons, 2003. Erl, T. Service-Oriented Architecture, Prentice Hall PTR

Filip, F.G. (2004) Sisteme suport pentru decizii, Editura Tehnica, Bucuresti, ISBN: 973-31-2232-7

Miles, A., Brickley, D. (2005), SKOS Core Guide, W3C Working Draft, Boston

Shadbolt, N., Hall, W., Berners-Lee, T. (2006) "The Semantic Web Revisited", IEEE Intelligent Systems, 21(3)

Sheth, A. et al., (2003) "Relationships at the Heart of Semantic Web: Modeling, Discovering, and Exploiting Complex Semantic Relationships", Enhancing the Power of the Internet, Springer-Verlag

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