AN INTERNET-BASED DISTRIBUTED SERVICE ARCHITECTURE

This paper describes a distributed architecture that enables the delivery of design services over the Internet. The architecture of an individual service is three-tiered. The first tier is a common communication protocol interface. The middle tier is the common product model interface. The third tier is the core of the design service. Though fundamentally decoupled, methods in the communication layer and the product model layer have been formalized to enable the aggregation of services and the support of problem decomposition. In addition, with the standardization of the first two tiers, it is possible to rapidly deploy various design services, both new and legacy applications, that can be easily made accessible via the Internet. As examples of design services, the prototype implements a project manager service with a companion CAD package, services that incorporate two legacy applications (a building code analysis service and a service that generates and displays an accessible path for a given floor plan design using motion planning and animation techniques), and a disabled access service that takes advantage of the decomposable infrastructure.