RCE: An Integration Environment for Engineering and Science

Abstract Engineering complex systems such as air- and spacecraft is a multidisciplinary effort that requires the collaboration of engineers from a multitude of specializations working in concert. Typically, each engineer uses one or more specialized software tools to analyze some data set and passes, in an ad-hoc manner, the results on to their colleagues who require these results as input for their respective tools. This process is time-consuming, error-prone, and not replicable. To alleviate this problem, we present RCE (Remote Component Environment), an open-source application developed primarily at DLR, that enables its users to intuitively integrate disciplinary tools, to define dependencies between them via an easy-to-use graphical interface, and to execute the resulting multidisciplinary engineering workflow. All data produced are stored centrally for provenance, subsequent analysis, and post-processing. Hence, RCE makes it easy for collaborating engineers to contribute their individual disciplinary tools to a multidisciplinary design or analysis, and simplifies the analysis of the workflow’s results.