RCE: An Integration Environment for Engineering and Science
This work addresses the challenge for engineers and scientists in collaborative environments to streamline multidisciplinary design and analysis processes, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing workflow integration concepts.
The authors tackled the problem of integrating multiple disciplinary tools in multidisciplinary engineering workflows by developing RCE, an open-source framework with a graphical interface that enables intuitive tool integration and centralized data collection.
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.