Abstract
The goal of the Federated Intelligent Product Environment (FIPER) is to form a federation of distributed services that provide engineering data, applications and tools on a network. A highly flexible software architecture has been developed, in which engineering tools like computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided engineering (CAE), product data management (PDM), optimization, cost modeling, etc., act as distributed service providers and service requestors. Service providers can enter the federation by registering with a service registry and publish the services through a process of discovery and join. An environment like this requires a mechanism for interprocess message passing from services to clients, services to services, and even clients to clients. The design issues of such a system and its implementation in the FIPER environment are described.
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