CONCURRENT ENGINEERING: Research and Applications Distributed Design Process Coordination based on a Service Event Notification Model

Due to the complexity and uncertainties, the distributed design process requires dynamic collaborations among the heterogeneous systems and human interactions. In order to coordinate different system applications and humans, an event notification model is required. In this article, we propose a service event notification model based on grid service. The model takes advantage of the grid infrastructure and reduces the need for ad hoc development of middleware for supporting process coordination. In this model, an event notification server composed of a group of grid services can capture events from other grid services and generate process events. When an event occurs, event notification server decides to whom it should send the event according to an awareness model that keeps the states of the underlying coordination policies and business rules. The awareness model and the methodology for building an event notification system, together with the infrastructure of the notification server are presented in the article. An example in applying the model to a vehicle design project coordination scenario is presented to illustrate the potential application of the event notification model.