Supporting Engineering Processes Utilizing Service-Oriented Grid Technology

Speeding up knowledge-intensive core processes in engineering and increas-ing the quality of their results is becoming more and more decisive, since the economic pressure from national and international competitors and custom-ers is rising. In particular, these demands exceed the organizational and in-frastructural capacities of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) by far. Hence, combining complementary core competencies across organizational boundaries is crucial for an enterprise’s continuing success. Efficient and economically reasonable support of knowledge-intensive core processes in virtual organisations is therefore a predominant requirement for future IT infrastructures. The paradigm shift to service-orientation in Grid middleware opens the possibility to provide such support along the product lifecycle by employing a flexible software development approach, namely to compose applications from standard components, promising easier development and modification of Grid applications. In this paper, a service-oriented Grid computing approach is presented which aims at supporting distributed business processes in industry (see sections 2 and 3 for industrial scenarios and the resulting requirements). The current status of implementation of the proposed approach is demonstrated by pre-senting an exemplary process chain from the casting industry and its support by various tools provided via a grid portal. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents several industrial engi-neering scenarios to explain the context of our work. Section 3 explains the requirements of a typical engineering process from the area of metal casting. The proposed approach to support this process is presented in section 4. Sec-tion 5 discusses the realization of the Grid portal. Section 6 concludes the paper and outlines areas for future research.