SPEEDS Engineering Environment: Get work done

The SPEEDS engineering environment combines several modelling tools together with various analysis tools and newly created modelling tools. The engineering activities are guided by a Process Advisor. All are working on a common data basis the SPEEDS Repository (see Figure 3).

The SPEEDS bus is responsible to connect all kind of tools and services to be able to work together. For this integration of services the SPEEDS Bus offers a well defined API (the SPEEDS Bus Service Layer) and all tools are connected to the SPEEDS engineering environment through this API. Using this API the SPEEDS Engineering Environment is open to integrate additional tools – design tools as well as analysis tools.

While the SPEEDS bus is the central point of tool interaction the SPEEDS model repository is the only data storage for all tools, the storage itself being a tool providing its service.

Each tool stores its data in the repository. This may be the system’s HRC model processed in common by all tools, a tool proprietary data (using a proprietary tool format) or analysis results. Further more the tool may add links to other related files, e.g. an analysis file or a HRC representation of the tool related model. Hence the SPEEDS Repository stores all kind of data as files and furthermore relation among several kinds of data (for example proprietary tool data linked to HRC representative or refinement relations between components, etc.). The structure of the repository, i.e. the kind of data and the kind of relations among the data, is described in an XML file, which is used by the repository to manage the stored data.

  Figure 3: The SPEEDS Engineering Environment