A Service-Oriented Grid-Based Infrastructure for Supporting Virtual Prototyping in Manufacturing

Virtual prototyping in manufacturing gains more and more importance, since companies competing in industry noticed the increasing cost pressure alongside higher quality requirements. The utilization of virtual prototyping techniques provides a possibility to reduce the total development costs and the time to market, while simultaneously innovations of both products and processes increase the overall quality of the manufactured parts. The monetary effort and the lack of know-how especially in small and medium sized enterprises which is required to operate such systems lead to a disadvantage in the more and more globalized market. This paper states the problem of supporting virtual prototyping processes in the manufacturing industry and gives a solution approach by utilizing service-oriented architectures and concepts from grid computing. A pilot implementation of the proposed architecture is introduced and evaluated by case studies in various manufacturing domains.