IDA spearheaded a collaboration between industry and academia to work on a 4-year Collaborative Engineering Programme (CEP) in August 2004. CEP aims to bring about distributed and integrated collaborative engineering applications to manage the value chain through engineering collaboration, in response to outsourcing trends and the challenge of fragmented value chains.
The programme strategy is to develop collaborative engineering tools to address key activities within the collaborative engineering value chain:
- Design
- Planning and Management
- Realisation
New tools such as simulation-based design and project scheduling, design flow management and distributed collaborative design will be developed by leveraging on advances in ICT such as peer-to-peer and grid computing and advances in areas of Lean Thinking, Constraint and Flow Management, and 3D Design and analysis.
Realistic cases and problems will be leveraged to guide the development efforts. Users from local construction and manufacturing companies will also be involved to encourage adoption of these tools by these verticals in terms of:
- Collaboration to determine present and future requirements for such tools based on industry needs
- Pilots and trials of the new tools developed
This programme aims to help local manufacturing and construction industries become more responsive to market changes, shorten their time-to-market, and achieve significant cost savings and productivity gains. The programme will also help to give them the competitive edge to exploit new revenue opportunities in emerging overseas markets, which has been estimated to be US$360b for the construction market alone, comprising China, Indonesia and India.
IDA has gathered a number of partners to deliver this strategic development. The Laboratory for Concurrent Engineering and Logistics (LCEL) at the Faculty of Engineering, NUS (National University of Singapore), will contribute their R&D efforts to the programme while local systems integrator, STE-Infosys, will offer its software development expertise and play a key role in the commercialisation of the new tools. Sun Microsystems will provide both infrastructure support and technical expertise in areas such as grid computing through their Asia-Pacific Science & Technology Centre. For enquiries on this programme, please contact the Technology Direction Division of IDA at
techinit@ida.gov.sg.
| 3 to 6 December 2006 |
STE-Inforsoft showcased the Integrated Project Scheduler (iPS) at the Annual Primavera Conference at San Diego. High interest for iPS has been registered for 50% of the delegates who visited the booth, especially from the construction and process industries. The official website set up by STE-Infosoft and NUS for this product is www.collabplan.com. |
| 16 to 19 May 2006 |
Grid Asia 2006. CEP was demonstrated at the GridAsia in its second year running. In particular, the Interactive Fixture Designer was shown with its complete workflow for fixture designing and design simulation for detection of faults using grid computing. |
| October 2005 |
CEP is featured in Oct 2005 Wave Article. A hybrid P2P (Peer-to-Peer) Grid is being developed as part of CEP to facilitate the sharing of model data for the manufacturing industry. |
| 3 to 6 May 2005 |
Grid Asia 2005. The National Grid Office (Singapore) launched the inaugural Grid Asia event at the Biopolis in conjunction with its partners. This event was co-organized by the A*Star (Agency for Science, Technology & Research), IDA, NTU (Nanyang Technological University) and NUS (National University of Singapore), and had Minister Lim Hng Kiang as its Guest of Honour. CEP was presented as one of the signature projects at Grid Asia 2005.
A dedicated booth was set up to brief Minister Lim and other Grid Asia participants on CEP. As part of the industry focus for Grid Asia, a CEP (Collaborative Engineering Programme) Workshop was also conducted on 4 May 2005, with the aim of keeping industry and academia abreast of how technologies such as Grid Computing are being used as technology enablers for collaborative engineering. The Workshop covered aspects such as:
- The lean construction tools currently being developed in the CEP, covering constraints management, parameter dependencies management and constructability analysis. It also covered an introduction to fixture design and issues relating to the capture such fixture design knowledge for fixture design.
- A conceptual overview of Grid Computing and its application within CEP, in terms of collaborative engineering and simulation-based design. The use of P2P-enabled applications to support, and enhance, collaborative engineering activities in the AEC industry was also discussed, together with a case study in production scheduling.
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