Instructional Designer's Workbench

This proposal provides a solution to problems in using disparate integrated computer-based design tools to determine the performance of underwater weapon and vehicle concepts. The proposed system would consist of a suite of domain-specific engineeringsoftware applications that undersea weapon and vehicle engineers would access and operate via personal computers as thin-clients over a secure network. Critical to enabling this design environment is a middle layer of software that provides workflowmanagement, messaging services, analysis integration, optimization, and data and model persistence. A presentation layer of software applications will be able to provide an immersive user interface to interactwith engineering applications. Such a systemcan be easily extended as new analysis applications become available and as the user community grows.The benefit of such a system has two components, reduction of total ownership cost, and improved quality of design. The reduction of cost comes from the fact that potential design conflicts have been resolved early in design, in such a way that optimizesnot only the weapon or vehicle design, but also its manufacturability, and life cycle maintenance costs. The system acheives this benefit by encouraging product team members to utilize the best available design, manufacturing, and operation tools, as wellas to communicate and negotiate frequently. The system benefits not only the design team, but also the application developers, by allowing easier updates of codes during the design cycle, and by providing an environment to test, validate, and benchmarknew codes. To the undersea weapon and vehicle design community, the system provides a framework for the product development, access to all the necessary applications, and produces greater capability than the individual applications alone.