A Model Driven Framework for Integrated Computational Materials Engineering

Integrated computational materials engineering (ICME) is a new approach to the design and development of materials, manufacturing processes and products. The approach proposes using a combination of modeling and simulation, data driven reasoning and knowledge guided decision making to a) speed up the development of new materials and manufacturing processes, and b) enhance the quality and time-to-market of products by integrating material design with product design. However industrialization of this approach requires strong automation support. Modeling and simulation is a highly knowledge intensive activity and integrated design requires knowledge cutting across several design domains. For the industrialization vision to succeed, it is essential to capture this knowledge and make it available in a usable form for people not so skilled in these areas. With this motivation, we are building a comprehensive computational platform to support this emerging design paradigm. The platform is built on model driven engineering principles. We present some of the key ideas of the platform, discuss the modeling challenge involved and present the modeling framework we have developed to address this challenge. We also briefly discuss how model driven techniques have been employed to automate some of the key aspects.