Parameter mapping and data transformation for engineering application integration

Enterprise applications may be classified into management applications used by managerial staffs for making decisions on business operations, and engineering applications used by engineers for solving multidisciplinary design problems. In the literature, enterprise application integration is extensively addressed in the context of management applications, but insufficiently discussed in the engineering disciplines. Practitioners in manufacturing industries have for a long time feel the increasing need of integrating engineering applications, in order to accelerate product development paces and improve design qualities. Integrating engineering applications used in the multiple engineering disciplines has to cope with a number of challenges. This paper focuses on one of the critical issues: parameter mapping and data transformation, which is of pivotal importance to integrating engineering applications. Design parameter mapping provides a consistent approach to data extraction, storage, display and manipulation among different data sources. Data transformation describes the operational logic of parsing input/output files, extracting and transforming data, and maintaining consistency among multiple data sources.