The DLR developed the open source software framework RCE to support the collaborative and distributed work in the shipyard industry. From a technology side of view a software from the shipbuilding field has many requirements in common with aerospace software projects. Accordingly, RCE has become the basis for further projects within the DLR. Over the last years of usage a subset of frequently used software components could be derived and are provided by the RCE framework. In particular, the workflow engine, allowing the integration of different domain-specific tools from local and remote locations into one overall calculation has become important for various projects. We present RCE and show how its software components are reused in two aerospace applications.

The need for collaboration between individual scientific fields increases with the wish for more global engineering optimizations and assessment requirements. Since areas of research become more and more fine-grained domains of there own, it is still very desirable to cooperate with other experts with more chance than ever to gain synergies when science is scattered as today. But this exchange of knowledge comes only into consideration if it can be used in a simple way with at most an moderate initial effort. To this end a framework is developed that lets scientists easily use knowledge of others without the need to understand their work and technology completely. Furthermore a generic common data format based on XML technology is developed for exchanging and storing data between different domain-specific applications. To support all implementers, a twofold abstraction layer was introduced to encapsulate their knowledge shielding it from the technical environment.

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