A Web services based distributed multidisciplinary design optimization framework to ship design

Ship design is a complex process, which contains many coupled disciplines and needs the collaboration among geographical distributed design resources. Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) provides a promising way to ship design compared to traditional spiral design approach. As the important enabling tool, MDO framework is vital to the successful implementation of MDO problems. In this paper, at the base of surveying the state of the art of some notable MDO frameworks, a Web services and Isight based distributed ship MDO framework is proposed, which provides an easy way to integrate distributed design, analysis, optimization services, namely various tools and programs, to jointly implement ship design. At the same time, according to the requirements of ship design, some new and extended function modules are added, which incorporates a number of existing technologies such as workflow, component technology.