Functional Classification of Computational Services in an Internet-Based Distributed Modeling Environment

New emerging modeling and simulation environments have the potential to provide easy access to design models and simulations over the Internet, much as the World Wide Web (WWW) has provided easy access to information. Parametric simulation models accessible through such Internet-based environments can be seen as providers of computational services. As Internet-based computational services become more common, an effective mechanism for identifying functionally appropriate computational services will be necessary to support distributed simulation-based design. There are ongoing efforts to develop ontological descriptions of computational services, with the goal of explicitly defining the functional or semantic role of a computational service. However, much in the way web search engines operate, the goal of this work is to use patterns found within the syntactic information in interfaces for computational model services to identify functional roles. Typical, pre-existing syntactic information expected to be available—such as model and parameters names, parameter units, and input/output structure—are identified. Given a model with a known functional role, a Fuzzy Attributed Relational Graph representation of its syntactic interface information is used as a pattern or template for this known role. Then, using a graph-matching algorithm based on attribute similarity metrics, the interface information from other models can be classified against the functional template. New information from functionally equivalent model interfaces that have been found can be incorporated into the original template, thereby both generalizing the pattern for the functional role and strengthening the most critical aspects of the pattern. Test results for a prototype implementation of the proposed algorithm are provided.Copyright © 2005 by ASME