{"78731":{"#nid":"78731","#data":{"type":"news","title":"Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) Receives $1.5 Million to Create Online Collaborative Vehicle Design Capability","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EThe \u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/www.gtri.gatech.edu\u0022\u003EGeorgia Tech Research Institute\u003C\/a\u003E (GTRI) has received a $1.5 million contract to produce an online environment that would let multiple design teams work together to develop new military vehicles. \u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe VehicleForge project\u2019s goal is to create a secure central website and other web-based tools and methods that would facilitate such collaborative development. The work is sponsored by the Tactical Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cThe aim here is to fundamentally change the way in which complex systems are taken from concept to reality,\u201d said Jack Zentner, a senior research engineer who is leading the project for GTRI, along with research scientist Nick Bollweg. \u201cBy enabling many designers in varied locations to work together in a distributed manner, we\u2019re confident that vehicles \u2013 and eventually other systems \u2013 can be developed with greater speed and better results.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe core website, to be called vehicleforge.mil, would enable individuals and teams to share data, models, tools and ideas to speed and improve the design process. As part of supporting designer collaboration, the VehicleForge approach would allow participants to reuse the models, tools and other elements present on the site. \u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ETwo companies, Red Hat Inc. and RadiantBlue Technologies Inc., are collaborating with GTRI on VehicleForge. They will help GTRI address several issues, including the development of intellectual property information and governance models for designers using the vehicleforge.mil site. \u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe VehicleForge effort will draw on technology already being used at GTRI to develop open source software online. GTRI is involved in open-source software development through the five-year Homeland Open Security Technology (HOST) program, which is sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security. \u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EVehicleForge would expand cooperation among diverse groups that traditionally have not been able to collaborate easily. Vehicle designers from large corporations with significant tool investments will be able to share ideas with small innovative teams that possess diverse skill sets, experience levels and tools. Student teams could also participate at all levels, which would inject youthful creativity into the process and support the education of future professionals.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ETo enable collaboration on a large scale, VehicleForge is utilizing several key components to help create a secure collaborative environment.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cul\u003E\u003Cli\u003EA distributed version control system (DVCS) will provide a master repository that records changes to the design of vehicle systems and their components, simplifying the interoperation of design models built with different languages and supporting the merging of work products from one design project to another.\u003C\/li\u003E\u003Cli\u003ESemantic design will use a single, flexible data-structure language to facilitate data sharing and component reuse among both humans and machines. Each component of a vehicle will be represented as a DVCS-managed Web Ontological Language (OWL) file containing component attributes in a machine-readable form. \u0026nbsp;\u003C\/li\u003E\u003Cli\u003EA wiki-based front end will use open-source wiki software to produce a website interface that enables collaboration among multiple users. Features include word processor-like editors, access control, forum-style discussions, and change and version control on pages and file attachments.\u003C\/li\u003E\u003Cli\u003EMashup apps \u2013 VehicleForge users could continue to utilize the Internet\u2019s many useful offerings, such as Flickr, YouTube, blogs and online spreadsheets. The VehicleForge developers envision a family of mashup applications that will combine data from different sources, helping designers exploit the Internet\u2019s capabilities while maintaining compatibility with VehicleForge.\u003C\/li\u003E\u003C\/ul\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cThe framework that is being built into VehicleForge will provide designers with tremendous flexibility, yet security and version control can still be tightly managed,\u201d Zentner said. \u201cThe process will be very open \u2013 many different designers will qualify to access the website \u2013 but the distributed version-control system will require that any change to an existing element be thoroughly examined and tested before it\u2019s incorporated into the overall design.\u201d \u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EVehicleForge is part of the Adaptive Vehicle Make (AVM) program, a $10 million, four-year DARPA program announced in the first half of 2011. AVM\u2019s goal is to foster novel approaches to the design, verification and manufacturing of complex defense systems and vehicles.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe GTRI VehicleForge team will include seven scientists and engineers, Zentner said. The current contract, which covers one year of development, could be extended for additional years. \u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EZentner expects that VehicleForge will contribute significantly to the expanding open-hardware movement. A team from GTRI, RadiantBlue and Red Hat has met to discuss this goal with representatives from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which has an open-hardware initiative underway. The team is also meeting with Facebook, which is pursuing a project called Open Compute.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe talks have focused on how VehicleForge could serve as a major open-hardware design repository, much as websites such as github.com and sourceforge.net do for open-source software development.\u0026nbsp; \u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EOpen-source software development techniques will also be critical to the VehicleForge environment.\u0026nbsp; Open-source programs make their computer code available to communities of qualified programmers, speeding development, increasing security and flexibility, and potentially lowering costs.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cSome open-source websites already allow developers to work together on software, and the technologies used by those sites can be very valuable to VehicleForge,\u201d said Joshua Davis, a research scientist who is principal investigator for the HOST program at GTRI. \u201cBut the challenges of online collaboration for physical systems like vehicles are greater than for software collaboration, because designers of physical systems typically use a wide variety of modeling languages and data formats.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ETwo other research groups \u2013 one at General Electric and one at Vanderbilt University \u2013 have also received DARPA contracts to produce alternative versions of the VehicleForge concept. The three VehicleForge teams expect to meet periodically to discuss their work. \u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cBy the end of the first year, we expect to have a fully functional version of vehicleforge.mil up and running and open to a limited number of users,\u201d Zentner said. \u201cAnd we hope it won\u2019t be long after that when many different designers and teams will be working together on the site.\u201d \u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cem\u003EThis research is supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) through contact HR0011-C-0099. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of DARPA.\u003C\/em\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EResearch News \u0026amp; Publications Office\u003Cbr \/\u003EGeorgia Institute of Technology\u003Cbr \/\u003E75 Fifth Street, N.W., Suite 314\u003Cbr \/\u003EAtlanta, Georgia\u0026nbsp; 30308\u0026nbsp; USA\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EMedia Relations Contacts\u003C\/strong\u003E: Kirk Englehardt (404-407-7280)(\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:kirk.englehardt@gtri.gatech.edu\u0022\u003Ekirk.englehardt@gtri.gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E) or John Toon (404-894-6986)(\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:jtoon@gatech.edu\u0022\u003Ejtoon@gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E).\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EWriter\u003C\/strong\u003E: Rick Robinson\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EThe Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) has received a $1.5 million contract to produce an online environment that would let multiple design teams work together to develop new military vehicles.\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"Future military vehicles could be designed in a collaborative online environment being created by Georgia Tech."}],"uid":"27303","created_gmt":"2012-01-17 12:39:04","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 03:10:57","author":"John Toon","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","dateline":{"date":"2012-01-17T00:00:00-05:00","iso_date":"2012-01-17T00:00:00-05:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"hg_media":{"78681":{"id":"78681","type":"image","title":"VehicleForge117","body":null,"created":"1449178063","gmt_created":"2015-12-03 21:27:43","changed":"1475894691","gmt_changed":"2016-10-08 02:44:51","alt":"VehicleForge117","file":{"fid":"193875","name":"vehicle-forge117.jpg","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/vehicle-forge117_0.jpg","image_full_path":"http:\/\/www.tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/vehicle-forge117_0.jpg","mime":"image\/jpeg","size":1522104,"path_740":"http:\/\/www.tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/images\/vehicle-forge117_0.jpg?itok=xWPVDk4O"}},"78691":{"id":"78691","type":"image","title":"VehicleForge135","body":null,"created":"1449178063","gmt_created":"2015-12-03 21:27:43","changed":"1475894691","gmt_changed":"2016-10-08 02:44:51","alt":"VehicleForge135","file":{"fid":"193876","name":"vehicle-forge135.jpg","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/vehicle-forge135_0.jpg","image_full_path":"http:\/\/www.tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/vehicle-forge135_0.jpg","mime":"image\/jpeg","size":1625351,"path_740":"http:\/\/www.tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/images\/vehicle-forge135_0.jpg?itok=ADuPPtzb"}}},"media_ids":["78681","78691"],"groups":[{"id":"1188","name":"Research Horizons"}],"categories":[{"id":"145","name":"Engineering"},{"id":"147","name":"Military Technology"}],"keywords":[{"id":"690","name":"darpa"},{"id":"416","name":"GTRI"},{"id":"17441","name":"Jack Zentner"},{"id":"525","name":"military"},{"id":"17491","name":"military vehicle"},{"id":"17421","name":"vehicle design"}],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EJohn Toon\u003C\/strong\u003E, Research News \u0026amp; Publications Office (404-894-6986)(\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:jtoon@gatech.edu\u0022\u003Ejtoon@gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E).\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"email":["jtoon@gatech.edu"],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}