Finite element analysis with STEP in distributed and concurrent engineering environment

The growth of the World Wide Web and the advances in high-speed network access have greatly changed existing CAD/CAE environment. The WWW has enabled us to share various distributed product data and to collaborate in the design process. An international standard for the product model data, STEP, and a standard for the distributed object technology, CORBA, are very important technological components for the interoperability in the advanced design and manufacturing environment. These two technologies provide background for the sharing of product data and the integration of applications on the network. This paper describes a distributed CAD/CAE environment that is integrated on the network by CORBA and product model data standard STEP. Several prototype application modules were implemented to verify the proposed concept and the test result is discussed. Finite element analysis server are further distributed into several frontal servers for the implementation of distributed parallel solution of finite element system equations. Distributed computation of analysis server is also implemented by using CORBA for the generalization of the proposed method.