Collaborative HVAC design using interactive fluid simulations: A geometry-focused collaboration platform

This paper presents a generic approach to realizing a collaboration platform integrating various simulation tools, thereby providing multi-disciplinary engineering teams with powerful analyzing facilities. In the proposed architecture, a common model is centrally managed by a collaboration server. This model basically consists of a geometric model enhanced by adding semantic data like boundary conditions for a certain simulation. Other important components of the architecture are dedicated simulation servers, which provide simulation and analysis data for the engineer's front-end application and can be connected to the platform on demand. The suitability of the concept is demonstrated by means of a concrete implementation for a collaborative engineering scenario in the Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning (HVAC) domain, incorporating an interactive fluid simulation.