Web-based Simulation Architecture for Engineering Education using Java/XML

The objective of this paper is to present a new architecture for designing and developing a web-based teaching enhancement tool for the engineering education. This architecture will enhance student learning by providing an innovative way for them to interact with the common engineering software through the web. Once being finalized, the new architecture will provide a flexible learning environment and capabilities for the engineering students by allowing them to present, test and evaluate their own ideas. To demonstrate the capabilities of this architecture, we will present a simple Java application demo using this architecture. Moreover, we shall discuss briefly a new XML-based markup language, Control Block Diagram Markup Language (CBDML), written during development of this application. Since design of the architecture described in this paper has many possible applications, the CBDML represents the initial result and more work is expected to finalize the architecture and to deign and implement various production applications.