A Modern CORBA-Based Approach to Ad Hoc Distributed Process Orchestrations Applied to MDO

†‡ A Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDOPT) framework was developed for air vehicle design and analysis. The developed MDOPT system contains a collection of technology modules for performing optimization studies that can be configured and controlled by a Graphical User Interface (GUI). A CORBA based command and control layer called the Inter-domain Communication Facility (ICF) was developed for this framework to allow the user to interactively create ad hoc workflows between remotely distributed engineering processes running interactively or within batch queuing systems such as PBS. An overview of the design of the ICF and related software technologies are presented. The interaction of the ICF process flows with the MySQL-based Database Management Facility (DMF) and the practical design considerations related to the DMF are also discussed. Finally, a sample optimization workflow that allows human interaction is shown to demonstrate the flexibility of the system.