Alexander Weinert

Brigitte Boden, Jan Flink, Niklas Först et al.

We present RCE (Remote Component Environment), an open-source framework developed primarily at DLR (German Aerospace Center) that enables its users to construct and execute multidisciplinary engineering workflows comprising multiple disciplinary tools. To this end, RCE supplies users with an easy-to-use graphical interface that allows for the intuitive integration of disciplinary tools. Users can execute the individual tools on arbitrary nodes present in the network and all data accrued during the execution of the workflow are collected and stored centrally. Hence, RCE makes it easy for collaborating engineers to contribute their individual disciplinary tools to a multidisciplinary design or analysis, and simplifies the subsequent analysis of the workflow's results.

Dominik Schneider, Alexander Weinert

When designing multidisciplinary tool workflows in visual development environments, researchers and engineers often combine simulation tools which serve a functional purpose and helper tools that merely ensure technical compatibility by, e.g., converting between file formats. If the development environment does not offer native support for such groups of tools, maintainability of the developed workflow quickly deteriorates with an increase in complexity. We present an approach towards automatically identifying such groups of closely related tools in multidisciplinary workflows implemented in RCE by transforming the workflow into a graph and applying graph clustering algorithms to it. Further, we implement this approach and evaluate multiple clustering algorithms. Our results strongly indicate that this approach can yield groups of closely related tools in RCE workflows, but also that solutions to this problem will have to be tailor-made to each specific style of workflow design.