A hierarchical federated integration architecture for collaborative product development

Collaborative product development (CPD) is concerned with various experience, knowledge, teams, tools and processes. Since simulation is an important stage of CPD, high level architecture (HLA) has been successfully adopted as basic architecture of CPD systems. At the same time, HLA-based (federated) CPD systems also have some difficulties. Among these, effective communication and cooperation among these disparate parties are key challenges. In this article, a hierarchical federated integration architecture for heterogeneous information systems is proposed. Different from the tightly coupled collaborative systems for fixed-scenario collaborative jobs, the proposed architecture is more suitable for dynamic, loosely coupled and multi-objective collaborations. Under this architecture, cooperation individuals are the projections (ambassadors) of real subsystems on given application domains. The control scope of subsystems and the management scope of collaboration can be different in order to avoid exploring too many details about the subsystems and to maintain their independency. The owners of subsystems can fully control their own subsystems and share their resources as they wish. The failure of one subsystem does not affect collaboration among other subsystems, and each subsystem can work independently when the integration system fails. Moreover, hierarchical collaborations are achieved by introducing the concepts of system federation and application federation, which address the collaboration issues at the physical level and the logical level separately. A real industrial application system has been designed and implemented using the proposed architecture.