| The trends in the automotive industries including multilayered supply chain operation and modularized vehicle design are first been investigated and the need for a new distributed simulation methodology to couple distributed component models and support collaborative design of mechanical systems is identified in this research.; The three key ingredients to enable such a distributed simulation methodology are proposed and investigated. First, a general model XML description is defined, which is a key element in distributing the different component models in the simulation platform. Each component model is described with an XML description and stored in the model database. An integrated model can then be assembled based on these model descriptions. Simulation of an integrated model is initialized simply by sending the model descriptions to a simulation server(s).; Second, a new gluing algorithm, denoted as the T-T method, is developed, which enables distributed simulations (both the component models and simulation of the components) to be coupled while maintaining the independence of the separate components with minimum requirements for the interface information for the gluing algorithm. The gluing algorithm can be used to couple both finite element models and multibody dynamics models as demonstrated in this thesis. An algorithm to treat the non-matching interfaces between different finite element models is developed so that the gluing algorithm can be applied to a general class of simulation problems, since many simulation models are developed by different developers, and usually with non-matching interfaces.; Third, a logical distributed simulation architecture is laid out that can be implemented with one of the existing technologies for distributed computing. Interfaces between different network components have been standardized to enable extensibility of the architecture by wrapping simulation codes with the standardized interface methods.; To demonstrate the applicability of the developed methodology, a proof-of-concept web-based distributed simulation system is developed by incorporating the three major ingredients of the research. Two finite element codes, SAP and FEAP, have been wrapped using the proposed interface methods, which have been used in the demonstration simulation platform. Overall, this research presents a distributed simulation platform that fits the distributed nature of, and provides support to, the collaborative design in the multi-layered supply chain operations in the automotive industry. |
