E-Colleg

IST-1999-11746

Advanced Infrastructure for Pan-European
Collaborative Engineering

Jan. 2000 - Dec. 2003

Partners

Infineon Technologies AG, Germany
Institute of Electron Technology (ITE), Warszawa, Poland
SBS - Siemens Business Services, Germany
Silesian University of Technology, Gliwice, Poland
Thales Optronique, France
Universität-Gesamthochschule Paderborn, Germany

E-Colleg objectives

The goal of the E-Colleg project was to provide a new paradigm platform for distributed collaborative engineering through the definition and implementation of an advanced infrastructure for collaborative engineering. In contrast to industrial practices and available frameworks, this infrastructure and technology needed to consist of a set of interacting, location transparent services that can be dynamically configured and adapted to arbitrary tool configurations and location-independent design teams (changed consistency of the design team, transfer/delegation of tasks etc.) at run-time.

More precisely, the objectives of E-Colleg were to:

provide enabling technology for collaborative engineering based on an advanced infrastructure,
augment existing integration technologies by scalable, platform-independent tool registration and management services,
develop a new tool integration technology based on XML to handle security and access management for distributed teams, services and data,
provide a solution for multi-site and multi-platform tool integration,
develop a technique for dynamic tool integration based on novel agent technology,
demonstrate feasibility of the pan-European collaborative engineering by development of industrial applications.

E-Colleg approach

E-Colleg investigations towards the collaborative infrastructure for distributed engineers were initially based on the ASTAI® integration infrastructure that is the result of C-Lab's research. First experiments with basic collaborative services that used ASTAI® confirmed that security issues, and especially firewalls, constituted a real challenge for the integration of distributed tools. Basic services within a collaborative engineering infrastructure covered a flexible communication backbone, as well as a set of basic services for: engineering data management, engineering workflow management and automation, and basic tool encapsulation.

In the following project phase, this infrastructure was validated through realisation of two engineering tasks that required distributed collaboration. They constituted truly industrial application scenarios. The first scenario comprised a collaborative development of a digital camera (Thales Optronique and Institute of Electron Technology). The second one was a collaborative development of VHDL-based system level testbenches (Infineon Technologies and Silesian University of Technology) for one of the Infineon's components. Both applications were designed and verified by a distributed team of engineers in a framework of a multi-site project infrastructure coupling the design flows of a design team from major industries with SMEs involved. Results of these distributed engineering tasks influenced specifications of advanced services that the target infrastructure needed to fulfil. An agent-based service for active tool integration and advanced data exchange definitions constituted the core of the solution.

The final phase of the project validated the advanced TRMS infrastructure by its deployment in both application scenarios. The results were measured using earlier defined metrics.

More details on the project strategy are available in the paper presented at the eBusiness and eWork conference that was held in Venice on 17-19 Oct. 2001.

E-Colleg results

The E-COLLEG main result constitutes the advanced collaborative infrastructure (ACI) for distance spanning, secure tool integration and management, as well as open interfaces for XML-based data exchange which have been developed by the project. ACI combines secure peer-to-peer data transfer with XML-based tool integration. It has been tested with applications in the field of Electronic Design Automation (EDA). The infrastructure supports engineers in their Internet-based collaboration during the design of complex electronic systems.

E-Colleg collaborative infrastructure

E-COLLEG ACI is based on three core services and a complementary transport service (ANTS) which enables secure firewall-crossing communication between the components. The Tool Invocation Service (TIS) is the interface used by clients to activate remote tools. TIS invokes the Global Tool Lookup Service (GTLS) to discover the appropriate tool for the requested task. The activation of the remote tool is done by the Local Tool Control Service (LTCS) via the Tool Server (TS). Together with the Advanced Network Transport Services (ANTS), the instances of these services form the E-COLLEG ACI infrastructure.

The E-COLLEG ACI core components GTLS, LTCS and TIS, as well as ANTS are implemented as Web Services that are interconnected using the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). The SOAP messages between the components are transported using ANTS. In a general case, all ACI components are on separate machines connected to the Internet. Thus, they need to communicate through an insecure media and all data have to be encrypted and digitally signed by a sender.

The following three three elements of the E-Colleg collaborative infrastructure comprise innovative solutions:

TRMS – Tool Registration and Management Services which have been inspired by combined concepts of universal plug and play and Jini(TM) technologies applied to the needs of distance-spanning tool integration. Once registered, tools provide their service for distributed design teams. Advanced service discovery technologies connect to the most appropriate service with respect to optimal availability within the current configuration of the virtual engineering network.
ANTS - Advanced Network Transfer Services which provide an abstract data transport mechanism through reliable Request/Response functionality that are mapped to actual transport mechanisms, i.e., SOAP/HTPP or just TCP/IP. They allow to establish collaboration over the firewalls and introduce an abstract addressing schema that allows having unique addresses for each network node.
A new XML-based technique for integration of remote tools with XML formats which provide the semantics of the communication layers in ACI.

The E-Colleg collaborative infrastructure (ACI) was deployed in two realistic industrial scenarios yielding valuable results and recommendations. In the first scenario Thales Optronique S.A. (Paris) collaborated with Institute of Electron Technology (Warsaw) on an IP-based methodology for electronic system design. ITE played a role of an IP provider to Thales Optronique S.A., Paris. A distributed workflow had been defined that realized this design methodology. In the second scenario Infineon Technologies collaborated with SUT on collaborative development of testbenches for VHDL models.

Both experiments were also very valuable from the results exploitation perspective. In this context, we should mention that E-Colleg technology might also be considered as an enabler for outsourcing. Both application scenarios brought valuable experience in this respect.

Various experiments which were performed by ITE and TOSA, as well as, Infineon Technologies and SUT had resulted in valuable recommendations concerning deployment and further development of the E-Colleg advanced collaborative infrastructure.

Project challenges, objectives, activities, and the final results have been summarised in the E-Colleg Final Public Report. The list of publications, selected presentations and demonstrations, as well as the detailed programs of the E-Colleg-related workshops are available from the pages: Publications and Events. Two page note on E-Colleg.