Advances in information integration infrastructures supporting multidisciplinary design optimisation

Recently, complex engineering developments have required global optimisation to address multidisciplinary problems regarding contradicting engineering objectives. Today, engineering designers from a number of different disciplinary areas frequently interact with each other via cybernetic platforms, exchanging structure parameters and physical constraints. Therefore, seamless integration and efficient processing of engineering data among numerous heterogeneous data sources play an essential role in making trade-off optimisation decisions. Hence, a flexible information infrastructure is the cornerstone of supporting multidisciplinary analysis, design and simulations throughout product development cycles. Ubiquitous characteristics of data diversity, irregularity, redundancy and heterogeneity distinctively differentiate engineering information integration from information integration in managerial domains. This poses a challenge to effective IT implementation in engineering-intensive enterprises. The special issue intends to present the ongoing research into the area of information technologies application to multidisciplinary design optimisation support and analysis. Five papers have been selected to appear in this special issue. The first paper presents a methodology to develop a virtualisation-based simulation platform, which is used to support multidisciplinary design of complex products. The second paper presents approaches for engineering software integration and product data exchange, which can support interoperations among different engineering phases. While, the third paper discusses mathematical formulation and optimisation method for pipe routing engineering problems, which is of great significance to gas turbine developments. Subsequently, the fourth paper addresses autogenetic design theory and distributed computing approaches and their applications to multidisciplinary design optimisation. Finally, the fifth paper describes a web services-based multidisciplinary design optimisation framework, which can more efficiently and flexibly provide integration and data exchange services. While it is impossible to provide a comprehensive and systematic presentation regarding all critical perspectives, the guest editor believes that the special issue will kindle research interest in enabling IT approaches to build an effective and efficient multidisciplinary engineering infrastructure. The Guest Editor is grateful to all the authors for their submissions, and to all the referees for their elaborate reviews and constructive comments.