TOWARDS ENGINEERING ON THE GRID

Grids are generally known as infrastructure for high performance computing. However, the original idea behind grid computing was to support collaborative problem solving in virtual organizations (VO). A challenge for collaboration infrastructures is to support dynamic VOs that collaborate on the design, production and maintenance of products that are described in complex structured product model databases. Such VOs are typical for industries with long supply chains like automotive, shipbuilding and aerospace. Per-haps the most complex dynamically changing VOs and are in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC). Semantic interoperability of software and information systems belonging to members of the VO is es-sential for efficient collaboration within the VO. We believe that the current state of the art - the Web Services paradigm, is too fragile and tangled for efficient collaboration in AEC. Grids provide the robustness but need to be made aware of the business concepts that the VO is addressing. The grid itself needs to commit to the product's and process's ontology thereby evolving into an ontology committed semantic grid. To do so there is a need for the generic business-object-aware extensions to grid middleware, implemented in a way that would allow grids to commit to an arbitrary ontology. These extensions are propagated to toolkits that allow hard-ware and software to be integrated into the grid. This is expected to be done in a European Project called in-teliGrid. This paper presents its baseline, hypothesis and expected results. The project's impact is expected to be wide; it will create knowledge, infrastructure and toolkits that will allow for a broad transition of the indus-try towards semantic, model based, ontology committed collaboration using the grid, rather than the Web, as the infrastructure, thus enabling the grid to become a mainstream collaboration paradigm.