Aero Success Story

Organisations do not have to change their tools and processes to take
advantage of Grid

The aerospace industry deals with highly complex products that have data creation, management and curation requirements that span hundreds of collaborating organisations over a 50-year-lifecycle. Partners on a product team need to collectively manage thousands of interrelated processes.

The primary focus of the Aerospace Activity is the development and deployment of existing and emerging Grid technologies and concepts to enhance the collaborative engineering of sophisticated products.

The Aerospace Activity partners are using a multi-disciplinary collaborative design of a low-noise, high-lift landing system as an example scenario to drive the development of Grid technologies. This scenario is typical of complex sub-system design problems in the context of, for example, future-concept, unmanned cargo vehicles that require an ability to use airfields in noise-sensitive locations.

Newly developed middleware gives engineers desktop access to the power of
the grid

The SIMDAT aerospace partners worked on a more efficient approach to handle the resources within and outside enterprises by setting up a virtual organisation (VO) enabling the management of multinational projects. The VO allows prime contractors to manage the programme and supply chain using components from across the SIMDAT technology portfolio.

The successful integration of IT Innovation’s GRIA middleware into commercial off-the-shelf problem solving environments (PSEs) enables aerospace engineers to solve complex design problems by drawing on computing power from IT assets from across a computing Grid.

In addition to linking visual workflow tools the University of Southampton has integrated GRIA with the MATLAB environment, giving them the ability to use the analysis services being offered by BAE and EADS together with their OPTIONS optimisation toolkit to perform distributed product design.