Objective and description
The complexity of high-technology systems development has increased hugely in recent years. While measures such as cooperative development, joint ventures and risk-sharing projects are leading to ever greater decentralization of project teams, the high level of optimisation required of these products places upward pressure on the need for cross-discipline evaluation of the system as a whole. This discrepancy creates a need for extremely good communication in the widest sense of the word, for example between project teams at different locations or in different companies, between software tools from different disciplines, and between development environments with different structures and equipment.
Since the information technologies currently available fall short of these needs, there was a need to develop new types of communications technologies to support concurrent engineering business processes. In 2001 an industry consortium formed to address this subject with the participation of public research. The private-sector lead was taken by the companies MTU and EADS-Research in Munich. DLR was named as prime research partner.
The first step was PEP (Pilot Project Design of Complex Products in Distributed Development Environments), initiated in the summer of 2002. With a very short runtime (July 2002 - February 2003), this project identified the technologies currently used, as well as useful extensions and new developments. Longer-term, a multi-year project is slated to implement the areas of need identified in the pilot project.
MTU, EADS and DLR along with six other companies and the Technical University of Munich took part in the pilot project.
Project runtime
July 2002 - February 2003
DLR Simulation and Software Technology tasks
DLR Simulation and Software Technology was represented in the work packets "In-house distributed development" and "Multi-disciplinary optimisation".