摘要

In a ubiquitous computing environment, computeraided engineering (CAE) software packages can be encapsulated as a service and be accessible through networks, which is essential to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) for complex product design with limited computing resources. In this paper, a web service-based platform for the multi-disciplinary collaborative simulation (MDCSS) is proposed, which is a software-sharing environment. In MDCSS, although the CAE software packages reside in their remote application program servers, they are registered in the service center to be accessible according to the computing requests. Given the increasing CAE services with the same function, a quality of service (QoS)-aware scheduling method with real-time and countable parameters is proposed to adaptively select the most efficient web service among alternatives. Through an additional layer and an application broker for service scheduling, MDCSS allows allocating services automatically, keeping load balance, and minimizing human intervention. This platform is reusable, scalable, and efficient for implementation, which enables the end user to invoke the remote CAE software ubiquitously in a "pay-as-you-use" fashion.