A Service Oriented Architecture to Couple Virtual Prototypes with Functional Simulations
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Fachbereich 4: Informatik EADS Innovation Works A Service Oriented Architecture To Couple Virtual Prototypes With Functional Simulations Diplomarbeit zur Erlangung des Grades eines Diplom-Informatikers im Studiengang Computervisualistik vorgelegt von Marcus Berlage Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Stefan Muller¨ (Institut fur¨ Computervisualistik, AG Computergraphik) Zweitgutachter: Dipl. Inf. Ren´eSchubotz European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company Koblenz, im August 2010 Erkl¨arung Ich versichere, dass ich die vorliegende Arbeit selbst¨andig verfasst und keine anderen als die angegebenen Quellen und Hilfsmittel benutzt habe. Ja Nein Mit der Einstellung der Arbeit in die Bibliothek bin ich einverstanden. Der Ver¨offentlichung dieser Arbeit im Internet stimme ich zu. ................................................................................. (Ort, Datum) (Unterschrift) 0 Abstracts Zusammenfassung Mit Hilfe von virtuellen Prototypen werden Untersuchungen an Produkten, die sich noch in der Entwurfsphase befinden, vorgenom- men. Diese Arbeit stellt einen Ansatz vor, mit dessen Hilfe funktionales Verhalten und die daraus resultierenden Beziehun- gen zwischen funktionalen Objekten in virtuellen Prototypen dargestellt werden. Zu diesem Zweck wird eine Service Orien- tierte Architektur entwickelt, um eine VR Software mit funk- tionalen Simulationen bidirektional zu koppeln. Die Kommu- nikation zwischen den voneinander unabhaengigen Systemen wird von BPEL Prozessen orchestriert. Diese rufen die bereitgestell- ten Web Service Operationen auf und koennen zusaetzlich genutzt werden, um selber funktionales Verhalten zu simulieren. Zusaet- zlich wird eine grapische Benutzeroberflaeche bereitgestellt, um Szeneobjekte mit der Simulation ihres funktionalen Verhaltens zu verbinden und die erstellten Verbindungen zu verwalten. Abstract Virtual Prototypes are often used to test products which are still being developed and do not exist as real objects. This work is aiming to improve and enhance Virtual Prototypes by adding functional behaviour to the prototype and by establishing the functional relations between objects inside the prototype. A Ser- vice Oriented Architecture is developed to bidirectionally couple the VR software with functional simulations. BPEL processes are used to orchestrate the communication between the inde- pendent systems. These processes invoke the Web Service oper- ations provided by the systems and can also be used to model functional behaviour themselves. Thus, they can be functional simulations themselves. Additionally, a graphical user interface is implemeted to allow the user of the VR system to connect scene objects with their simulated functional behaviour and to manage the connections. i CONTENTS CONTENTS Contents 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Scope of Work . .1 1.2 Motivation . .2 1.3 Basic approach of this work . .3 1.4 Structure of the Work . .3 2 Related Work 5 3 Basic Knowledge for this Work 14 3.1 Virtual Reality . 14 3.2 Business Process Execution Language . 16 3.3 Web Services . 18 3.4 SOAP . 19 4 Requirements 21 4.1 Scenario Description and Stakeholder Analysis . 21 4.2 Functional Requirements . 26 4.3 Technical Requirements . 28 4.4 User Interface Requirements . 29 4.5 Quality Requirements . 30 5 Concept 31 5.1 VR System Concept . 31 5.2 Functional Simulation Concept . 33 5.3 Communication Concept . 35 5.4 General Architecture . 35 6 Implementation 40 6.1 The VDP Module . 41 6.2 The Connector Node . 42 6.2.1 Noticing User Interaction . 44 6.2.2 Sending Information to the Functional Simulation . 47 6.2.3 Receiving Information from the Functional Simulation 51 6.3 The Connector Node Manager . 56 6.4 The Graphical User Interface . 61 6.4.1 Designing the Modules Menu . 61 6.4.2 Implementing the Actions Performed by the Buttons . 63 6.4.3 Handling Listener Events . 65 6.4.4 Constructing the Module and its User Interface . 66 6.5 The Functional Object . 67 6.6 The BPEL Processes . 70 iii CONTENTS CONTENTS 7 Deployment of the Module 74 7.1 User Guide for the Module . 74 7.2 Extending the Module to Incorporate New Processes . 78 8 Results and Validation 81 9 Conclusion 85 Bibliography 87 Table of Figures 90 List of Tables 92 Listings 93 iv CONTENTS CONTENTS List of Abbreviations Abbreviation Meaning ALiSS Assembly Line Solution Set API Application Programming Interface BPEL Business Process Execution Language BPM Business Process Managment CAD Computer Aided Design DLL Dynamic Link Library DMU Digital Mock-Up EADS European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company FBB Functional Building Block FDMU Functional Digital Mock-Up FTP File Transfer Protocol FURPS Functionality, Usability, Reliability, Performance, Supportability GMTL Generic Math Template Library GUI Graphical User Interface HOTAS Hands ON Throttle And Stick HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers JBI JAVA Business Integration LAN Local Area Network OASIS Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards ODE Orchestration Director Engine RPC Remote Procedure Call SLX Simulation Language with Extensibility SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol SOA Service Oriented Architecture SysML Systems Modeling Language TCP/IP Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol UML Unified Modeling Language URL Uniform Resource Locator VDP Visual Decision Platform VDT Virtual Development and Training Platform VP Virtual Prototype resp. Virtual Prototyping VR Virtual Reality W3C World Wide Web Consortium WS-I Web Service Interoperability Organisation WSDL Web Service Description Language X3D Extensible 3D XML Extensible Markup Language v page 1 1 Introduction 1.1 Scope of Work The work presented herein is set in the context of the research project AVILUS 1. AVILUS is a project under the management of the Innovation Alliance for Virtual Technologies (IA VT) and is sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with a total of 28 partners involved in the project. Several leading major companies accompa- nied by medium sized enterprises and research facilities are joined together in this project and have set themselves the goal to develop and test new technologies in the field of virtual and augmented reality. The use cases for industrial application of the technologies are provided by the key industries from the sector of automotive and aeronautical engineering as well as from the field of plant engineering. One of the focuses of the AVILUS project is to enable a manufacturer to test his product designs in the context of human interaction and perception. By using the potentials that reside in the use of virtual technology it will be possible to evaluate a product at all stages of the development process and thus integrate the human factor and the role of the future user right from the beginning. The high level of immersion provided by the use of virtual and augmented reality results in a reliable source for studies on user friendliness and functional correctness without having to actually build the product. The aforementioned method to test and study a product, which until this point in time does not exist as a real object, is called Virtual Prototyping (VP). In the field of so called Virtual Prototyping Digital Mock-Up (DMU) is the keyword for innova- tive product development processes (Bullinger et al., 1999). This thesis is aiming to improve and enhance Virtual Prototypes, here- inafter refered to as VP's, by adding additional functionality to the Virtual Prototype. Virtual Prototypes are artificial, respectively vir- tual environments created for testing purposes. In the automotive and aeronautical engineering sector, VP's are utilized to perform ergonomi- cal tests on products that are currently being developed. Since building a real-life model for every design step or modification of the product is expensive both in cost and time, a less complicated tool for experiments is needed. When building a Virtual Prototype, it is often possible to use the data and specs that are already available from the engineering and design process, the technical drawings, or design studies. Modern design tools like 3D Studio Max, Maya, CATIA and other 3D modeling or CAD software are currently widely used in the field of engineering and the files created by them can play an important role in the efforts 1http://www.avilus.de page 2 1 Introduction to build a Virtual Prototype. The use case scenario for this thesis will be the industrial application of the Virtual Prototype to evaluate and verify concepts for aircraft designs. In this scenario, the VP must be able to offer realistic behavior and technical features and display cer- tain system configurations in a cockpit. All these attributes can then be examined with respect to Human-Computer-Interaction. 1.2 Motivation The use of functional and visual simulation for the purpose of early evaluation and system tests is presently a common practice. Connect- ing the two up until now independently used tools on the other hand is not bussiness as usual and is promissing to lead to some interesting fields of application. • The visual simulation would gain additional sources for input as the functional simulation would send state changes that can be handled by the simulation. No longer would it be limited in its depicted strings of actions by previously specified storylines that result in a plotline of animations. Developers responsible for the visual simulation could use events coming from the functional simulation as input and connect this input to events in the