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 is to provide a new paradigm platform for distributed collaborative engineering through the definition and implementation of an advanced infrastructure for collaborative engineering, i.e. unified dynamic Tool Registration and Management System - TRMS. The project is aiming at the definition of the infrastructure and technology for such services developed from industrial applications in the field of embedded systems design. Moreover, the project will come up with common practices and metrics for EDA workflow and improvements.

In contrast to current industrial practice and available frameworks, this infrastructure and technology will 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.

The project will also develop a distributed simulation technology. It is based on the Auriga(R) tool with collaborative verification extensions transparently linking geographically distributed designers into a concurrent verification session.

E-Colleg approach
E-Colleg investigations towards TRMS are based on the ASTAI® integration infrastructure that is the result of C-Lab's research. The solution will take into account major advanced technologies of collaborative computing and communication, namely: agent-based technologies, Jini, UDP, SNMP, CORBA, RMI.

Extensive experiments with basic collaborative services are being conducted within E-Colleg that use ASTAI®. These experiments confirm that security issues, and especially firewalls, constitute a real challenge for the integration of distributed tools. Basic services within a collaborative engineering infrastructure cover a flexible communication backbone, as well as a set of basic services for: engineering data management, engineering work flow management and automation, and basic tool encapsulation.

In the following project phase, this infrastructure will be validated through realisation of two engineering tasks that require distributed collaboration. They constitute truly industrial application scenarios. The first scenario comprises a collaborative development of a digital camera (Thales Optronique and Institute of Electron Technology). The second one is 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 are 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 will influence specifications of advanced services that the target infrastructure will have to fulfil. Foreseen services are: agent-based service for active tool integration and advanced data exchange definitions.

The final phase of the project will validate the advanced TRMS infrastructure by its deployment in both application scenarios. The results will be measured using the earlier defined metrics. The resulting infrastructure with its advanced services will be able to support complex distributed engineering tasks. The collaborative infrastructure will be brought to market as a Siemens Business Services product, while services for collaborative simulation are expected to become additions to the Auriga® product from FTL Systems UK Ltd.

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.

Major E-Colleg Deliverables

Basic Collaborative Engineering Environment (BiCEE) - 12.2001
TRMS Definition and Development - 06.2002
Integration technology based on XML - 12.2002
Deployment of the Advanced Collaborative Infrastructure prototype and its validation 03.2003
Methodology for collaborative development of models in application scenarios - 07.2003
Improvement metrics 08.2003

E-Colleg

Advanced Infrastructure for Pan-European Collaborative Engineering

Jan. 2000 - Dec. 2003

Advanced Infrastructure for Pan-European
Collaborative Engineering