Facilitating ICME through platformization

Abstract

Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) is poised to be integral to the engineering design processes in the future where product engineering will be carried out in close association with materials and manufacturing engineering. This is already being manifested in newer technologies such as additive manufacturing and composite materials where the boundaries between product and process and material are sufficiently blurred. In order to successfully leverage ICME, we need enabling platforms that should allow for seamless integration of product design with process design and materials design and should allow for all three to be investigated, analyzed and optimized simultaneously to be able to obtain the right material for the right product to be manufactured in the right way. It should also provide for a unified and flexible language for expressing the problem domain and allow for the integration of modeling and simulation tools, product and materials databases as well as machine learning, data-analysis and optimization algorithms into the design process. Most importantly, such a platform should be context aware and knowledge enriched. It should provide a strong semantic basis for expressing and capturing knowledge related to the problem domain and a means to reason with this knowledge in a context-sensitive manner to provide context-appropriate guidance to the designer during the design process. The current paper proposes a basic structure for such a platform and how it is being realized as TCS-PREMAP.