Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems

Mission

The mission of CCG is to develop, deploy, and maintain cyberinfrastructure supporting engineering systems of the future. It will provide an integrating platform enabling cooperation of heterogeneous components, seamless flow of data, persistence of information, and intuitive interfaces for controlling the design cycle without the need of the end user for deep understanding of underlying IT technologies.

Vision and Approach

The long term goal of the Cooperative Computing Group (CCG) is to provide support for system-level science. Essentially, system-level science is the broad understanding of how complex, multiphenomena physical systems behave and how their constituent components interact and interrelate.

Quoting Ian Foster, system-level science integrates not only different disciplines but also, typically, software systems, data, computing resources, and people. System-level science is usually a team pursuit. Data comes from different sources, different groups develop component models, team members provide specialized expertise, and the often substantial computing and data resources required for success are themselves diverse and distributed. Thus, system-level science itself requires the creation of yet another sort of system that may combine large numbers of both physical and human components.

To achieve our goal we are pushing forward the boundaries of Grid computing and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) to create and deploy autonomous, reconfigurable systems with the capability to self-configure, self-optimize, self-heal, and self-protect, adaptively adjusting to unforeseen events, unpredictable data, and changes in the resource availability and network weather.

We apply the results of our research to develop the cyberinfrastructure and simulation environments in several application areas, including:

• Computational manufacturing & design using multiscale simulations (DoE)
• Disaster management with current focus on the simulations of on-board propagation of smoke and fire (NRL)
• Science of Earth-Sun system (NASA)

Product Lifecycle Management

CAVS defines PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) as a business strategy that enables organizations to better utilize existing human resources while leveraging technology to dramatically reduce lead and design times, thus increasing product innovation and manufacturing efficiency through early innovation, virtual assembly, and simulation. The PLM group at CAVS is committed to investigating next-generation virtual manufacturing solutions and methods within the context of the modern manufacturing environment, with respect to materials, manufacturing resources, human factors, and business administration. Additionally, this group is committed to seeking and disseminating affordable PLM solutions for small and medium-sized manufacturers and collaborative solutions for manufacturers and their suppliers.