Federated P2P services in CE environments

The goal of the Federated Intelligent Product Environment (FIPER) environment is to form a federation of distributed services that provide engineering data, applications and tools on a network. A highly flexible software architecture has been developed, in which engineering tools like computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided engineering (CAE), product data management (PDM), optimization, cost modeling, etc., act as distributed service providers and service requestors. Service providers can enter the federation by registering with a service registry and publish the services through a process of discovery and join. The individual services communicate via so-called context models, which are abstractions of the master model of a particular product. Many instances of mechanical analysis have been implemented. FIPER supports three centricities and deploys three neutralities. FIPER’s three centricities are network centricity, service centricity, and web centricity. The three neutralities FIPER deploys are location neutrality, protocol neutrality, and implementation neutrality. In a federated peer-to-peer (P2P) environment, object-oriented concepts are applied to the network.