Keywords: product modeling, software engineering, database engineering, material modeling, model calibration.

The goal of the collaborative research center (SFB 532) "Textile reinforced concrete: the basis for the development of a new material technology" installed in 1998 at the RWTH Aachen is a complex assessment of mechanical, chemical, economical and productional aspects of the developed material. The research project involves 10 institutes performing parallel investigations in 15 projects. The coordination of such a research process requires effective software support for information sharing in form of data exchange, data analysis and data archival. Flexible structuring of the data gathered from several sources is a crucial premise for a transparent accumulation of knowledge and, thus, for an efficient research in a long run.

The development of such a system requires models to describe and organize the information and activities involved in the overall research process. Examples of formal specification of the process and product models in the modeling of production processes have been reported by Lee and Sause [1] and based on the entity-based approach.

The technical information system developed in the SFB 532 has been implemented as a database-powered web server with an object-oriented data model [2]. It serves as an intranet server with access domains devoted to the involved research groups. At the same time, it allows to present the selected results just by granting a data object an access from the public area of the server via internet.

The complex material research involves many aspects to be explored simultaneously at various levels of research. An effective information sharing and exchange can essentially increase the efficiency of research and enable more targeted progress of material development. The present article summarized the concepts of software engineering that have been applied in the system design of the TIS for textile reinforced concrete. The major goals of the TIS is to support

1. experimental design in a multi user environment,
2. data mining and data analysis,
3. calibration of newly developed material models,
4. sensitivity analysis with respect to input parameters [3] and
5. validation of the developed material models [4].

Currently, selected tasks are supported to exemplify the possibilities of the system architecture. Detailed elaboration of tasks like model validation and simulation supported design of experiments is the subject of the future research.

1

C. Lee, R. Sause, N. Hong, "Overview of entity-based integrated design product and process models", Advances in Engineering Software, 29(10), 809-823, 1998. doi:10.1016/S0965-9978(97)00065-3

2

R. Chudoba, W. Kuhlmann, "Ein technisches Informationssystem f�r Controlling und Präsentation des Sonderforschungsbereiches 532", 1. Fachkolloquium der Sonderforschungsbereiche 528 und 532, Aachen, 2001

3

D. Montgomery, "Design and Analysis of Experiments", John Wiley & Sons, 2001.

4

J.P.C. Kleijnen, R.G. Sargent, "A methodology for fitting and validating metamodels in simulation", European Journal of Operational Research, 82, 145-162, 2000. doi:10.1016/0377-2217(94)00016-6

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