Approaches to Improving Reliability in e-Engineering Framework

In order to improve productivity and quality of the products, there are many efforts to integrate and automate design/analysis processes based on various distributed engineering resources. KIMM (Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials) constructed SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)-based e-Engineering framework for flexible integration and automation of the engineering processes on the Web services environment. However, guaranteeing reliability in the engineering process is one of the new problems that must be solved in the e-Engineering framework. This paper presents two approaches to handle various exceptions that happen in the middle of the execution of the process. One is to introduce recovery activities into the engineering process modeling to handle exceptions caused by failures of the engineering resources; the other is to use log-based recovery techniques to recover from the system exceptions such as network failures or system crashes.