AVRRC Collaborative Virtual Engineering Facility
The Collaborative Virtual Engineering Facility is a revolutionary next generation approach to conceive, design and develop complex engineering systems. This facility allows geographically distributed teams to jointly work on a common engineering problem through sharing of their virtual workspace or environment.
The facility supports a heterogeneous mix of engineering tools and computational platforms in a way that allows integration of engineering data between co-workers who may be located in the Centre or dispersed around the world. Techniques originally developed under the UK e-Science programme (RealityGrid) permit co-simulation to occur between geographically distant users from the facility. A wide range of video conferencing or collaborative environments can be supported.
At the heart of this facility is the innovative use of model based engineering methods to deliver a model based approach to design rather than the traditional document centric approaches. By coupling the facility with state of the art interactive visualization systems it is possible to work across the full life-cycle from initial ideas through to executable code that can be targeted to virtually any platform. One of the many advantages of the facility is its ability to support interactive ultra scale (big data) investigations where a desktop display is inadequate.
The facility's interactive immersive visualization system features a completely seamless ultra-high resolution 150 degree panoramic display system.
The application domains for this technology are very diverse and covers the full spectrum from aerospace, automotive, built environment, construction, emergency response and management, energy, healthcare, transport and the utilities (electricity, gas and water). The facility has been enhanced to take advantage of the unique tools emerging from the EU FP7 DANSE - Designing Adaptability and Evolution for Systems of systems engineering and InnovateUK Agile Wing Integration projects.