SBIR-STTR Award

The complexity of modern ship systems has made it difficult to develop cost-effective system designs. Increasingly, system design activities involve cross-disciplinary teams of experts, each using a distinct set of tools. Data exchange between different tools is often difficult, error prone, and adds little value; consequently, collaborations that could increase system performance or reduce cost do not occur as frequently as necessary to produce an optimal system design. This proposal offers a framework for building a collaborative, smart product model over the World Wide Web. This environment will enable increased collaboration among cross-disciplinary teams for large, complex systems and the production of designs with higher performance and lower cost across the life

Benefits:
The benefits of this work are increased potential for collaboration among suppliers and Navy procurement organizations, as well as within members of the ship building industry. This will lead to lower cost and higher performance. Potential commercial applications will include Web based collaborative design environments for large manufacturers in the ship building, automotive, aerospace, and other industries.

Keywords:
STEP smart product model collaborative application server SBA

The WSME architecture defines a standards-based product data application server, using ISO 10303 application protocols and implementation methods containing the following major elements: - A ship product data viewer for displaying, highlighting and spatially selecting ship products. - A ship product browser for finding information in the standards-based server. - A ship product data server based on product data content protocol allowing query results and data updates to be described as easy to understand XML data streams and a messaging protocol allowing clients to send queries over the Internet.

Benefits:
The Ship Plant Modeling instantiation of the WSME will give the supply chain for shipbuilding and maintenance low cost access to ship plant design data using viewers and browsers. The new environment will allow the supply chain to access this data without purchasing specialist CAD/CAM systems for shipbuilding. Therefore, it will allow the industry to reduce costs and improve efficiency by moving from drawing-based communication to the sharing of full-fidelity 3D product models.

Keywords:
STEP, smart product model, simulation-based acquisition, XML