Introduction
Concurrent Design is an approach to design activities in which all design disciplines and stakeholders are brought together to create an integrated design in a collaborative way of working.
The Concurrent Design method brings many advantages to early design phases by providing a structure for this otherwise chaotic phase. Many design concepts have been implemented in the Concurrent Design method to help a team of stakeholders perform their task. The design work is done in collocated sessions with all stakeholders involved and present, creating an integrated design and enabling good communication and exchange of information between team members.
CDP4-COMET is a collaborative Model Based System Engineering suite of tools that is typically used to support the Concurrent Design process. Each engineer or stakeholder that needs to contribute to the design can interact with the model data using end user tools such as a desktop application and web application. The modelling data is stored on a server which is the CDP4-COMET WebServices.
You can find the desktop and web application in the following locations:
- CDP4-COMET Integrated Modelling Environment: https://github.com/STARIONGROUP/COMET-IME-Community-Edition
- CDP4-COMET Web Application: https://github.com/STARIONGROUP/COMET-WEB-Community-Edition
- User Manual: https://www.stariongroup.eu/document/cdp4-comet-manual/
CDP4-COMET has a typical three tier architecture. The Web Services component is the application server that makes it possible to share data and perform concurrent and collaborative engineering. It exposes a REST API that supports reading and writing data – it is the “gate” to the central repository where concurrent design teams share information. The persistence layer stores all the data using a PostgreSQL relational database. The combination of the CDP4-COMET WebServices and CDP4-COMET database make up the back-end. The back-end provides access to the full history of all changes created to the data along the three axes: "who, what, when".
CDP4-COMET is an implementation of ECSS-E-TM-10-25A Annex A and C. Annex A is the formal underlying meta-model. Annex C is the specification of the REST API that is exposed by the WebServices. The REST API is used by the CDP4-COMET end user applications (i.e. the Desktop app and the Web app) to interact with the data. Integrations with other tools can of course be created as well and the REST API provides the means to make the connection with the back-end.
The details of the REST API are described here