Advanced Information Technologies - Virtual Early Prototyping Open Platform:

AIT-VEPOP (IST-1999-13346) is a European Research Project within the IST Programme of 5 th Framework. The project is scheduled from July 2000 to June 2002. Members of the AIT-VEPOP consortium are EADS CCR (co-ordinator), Airbus GmbH, Astrium GmbH, Flowmaster Ltd., CNAM, University of Oulu, and DFKI. AIT-VEPOP deals with issues of co-operative work and concurrent engineering with respect to the use of virtual prototypes in the early design phases of an aircraft.

The context is the design of complex products within a virtual environment during the concept phase when most of the decisions are taken.

The project aims to define and demonstrate, in two years, a large-scale virtual reality framework over the Internet for product virtual early prototyping. Two communication systems and applications will be set up in order to achieve interactive co-operative design and interactive distributed simulation within a geographically widespread product team.

The first objective is to develop two communication systems. The former will enable to virtual conferencing, interactive collaborative and parallel work. The latter will enable to perform real-time consistent distributed simulations.

The second objective is to build up and assess two prototypes, for structure and system engineering , integrating these communication systems.