A Study on the Web-based Distributed Design Application in the Preliminary Ship Design

Today's engineering design is carried out in a distributed fashion geographically or physically. This places new requirements on the computational environments such as efficient integration and collaboration. With the advances of the Internet and Network environment recently, many researches have been proposed and at the same time, Web-based distributed design gives to a new paradigm in design and manufacturing fields. That is, Web-based technologies lead to reduce the product development times and to ensure a competitive product in order to exchange and interact of real-time design information that integrates the distributed design environment between departments as well as companies via Internet and Web. So, an efficient data communication for design information sharing is the foundation for collaborative systems in the distributed environment. Design data communication techniques such as CORBA, DCOM and RMI have been considered in the existing research but they have some problems that are limitations of interoperability and firewall problems in the Web. Therefore, this paper presents a Web-based distributed design application where distributed design information resources are integrated and exchanged using Web Services for supporting XML and HTTP without the interoperability and firewall problems through the 330K VLCC case.