A Low Cost CDF Framework for Aerospace Engineering Education Based on Cloud Computing

Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) is an effective and efficient manner to implement Concurrent Engineering methodology. In aerospace engineering education, CDF is invaluable to lecturers by enabling the entire student team to gain cross-discipline skills and at the same time stay at the cutting edge of technology. Establishment of CDF is always consuming much money on hardware and software. This paper presents a low cost CDF framework which is suitable for aerospace engineering education in class room based on cloud computing. An important aspect of CDF is collaboration between multidisciplinary specialists or virtual specialists in the environment of engineering education. Collaboration in CDF requirement some dedicated hardware or software to exchange file, manage knowledge, collaborative work on writing report, and even remote communicate with other work teams in traditional means. Emergence and development of cloud computing have made above-mentioned requirements become very easy to be fulfilled. Some public cloud computing servers, such as Google Drive, SkyDrive, Dropbox, Mendeley, can be used in CDF for education to save investment on hardware and software related to data, file, and information exchange. Google Talk and Skype can be used to remotely communicate with work team at other location. This CDF framework has many benefits, include low cost on hardware, software and human, reduce preparation time, and easy to deploy in classroom education.