Towards an Adaptive Civil Engineering Computation Framework

Abstract

Virtual desktops and virtual applications nowadays become popular in civil engineering companies. Current developments of software vendors trend to the outsourcing of the engineer's workstation to the cloud. However, in the foreseeable future companies will rely on hybrid environments where traditional tasks are handled by traditional applications and cloud platforms are used for more dynamical business areas. Furthermore, stakeholders in construction projects are geographically spread and work together only temporary. Traditional applications never were designed for this scenario. In this paper we introduce the BIMgrid, a work in progress to develop an innovative, adaptive infrastructure integration framework for civil engineering applications, based on private grid and public cloud resources. Although some middleware solutions for the efficient combination of hardware already exist, they are mostly based on UNIX and demand advanced technological knowledge to implement.We present our current state of work and give an overview about the architecture of the BIMgrid, the integration into an IT infrastructure, data management and the interfaces to use it's features with common applications. The prototype implementation is designed as a layered, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and offers several interfaces. Data Management in the BIMgrid will be based on vendor specific data formats and the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard and hence supports the interoperability between applications. Our prototype has been developed in several research projects and tested by industry partners under real conditions.We expect to reduce costs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through the automation of complex workflows, optimization of data transfer and reduction of the communication effort between stakeholders. Further we want to make benefits of grid and cloud computing accessible to companies, without dissipation of so far made hard- and software investments.