Agility in Large Scale Engineering

VEGA addresses the Virtual Enterprise vision that enforces a new middleware architecture to overcome shortcomings in today's database interoperability and distributed system.

Short term relationships

It targets the large scale engineering industry, which works on shorter term business relationships and supplier chains geared to a spesific project. For example, to realise a client's brief for a new building, a complex grouping of consultants, designers, fabricators, suppliers and sub-contractors is created.

Examples of large scale engineering (LSE) are process plants, offshore structures, power plants and infrastructure projects. They are characterised by their high capital cost, multi-disciplinary inputs, complexity of assembly and one-of-a-kind nature.

Plug-in and Play

VEGA will create a software architecture that will make the exchange of project information between these disparate organisations a seamless process. This will allow each member of the virtual enterprise to plug in their best-practice software to the virtual enterprise integrated environment without any up-front expensive and time consuming integration activity.

Current operating systems and applications enable users to "cut-and-paste" or embedded information from different packages without worrying about compatibility, converting files or recreating data. VEGA aims to offer similar functionality for engineering and business applications within the virtual enterprise. VEGA is promoting a semantic plug in and play concept that from far is available today.

VEGA is a 3 year ESPRIT-project (1996-1998) that brings together leading European specialists from the computing and construction industries.