Topology-based construction of business-integrated material modelling workflows

Designing a new product requires information from the business and physical domains, which implies integrating business decision tools with process and material simulation processes to form an overall workflow. The integration involves coupling the business workflow management systems with analysis tools, optimization and decision support systems, which require process simulations and an integrated data transfer service. The process simulation, in turn, will in general model multiple layers of time scales and is therefore also in need of data transfer between solvers. Here we discuss the main components of such an architecture in the light of a coating-design project.