Mapping Engineering Design Processes onto a Service-grid: Turbine Design Optimization

This study presents an application of a distributed service-oriented architecture (FIPER) for the preliminary design of gas turbines. The FIPER architecture is based on the concept of registration and discovery of services in real time. It uses a service catalog that registers the services started on the network. These services are then discovered in real time from the grid and used in the design process. The turbine preliminary design process involves changing the configuration of the turbine incrementally and evaluating its performance using analysis (simulation) code. During the design process a one-dimensional analysis code is wrapped into a service using a standard interface developed in FIPER and launched on the network. Several such services were distributed across a grid of workstations. These services were then used to support the turbine configuration optimization process. The study presents the results of the optimization as well as the scalability characteristics of the service-grid.