Simulation on demand

The use of engineering meta-applications for activities such as design optimisation and sensitivity analysis can provide substantial business benefits, but require significant computing resources. However, they can be made financially viable through the exploitation of software and hardware on demand business models, supported by an electronic marketplace. This paper presents an agent-based business-to-business e-commerce system that enables large-scale distributed engineering simulations using third-party resources. The system has wide applicability and can form an e-business framework for many resource-intensive applications provided by the emerging application service provision (ASP) market.