Providing Worldwide Intranet Access to Product Lifetime Calculations Using MATLAB Production Server

At Bosch, an in-house developed program is used for engineering push belts—a critical part of the continuous variable transmission (CVT). The main function of the program is to estimate product lifetime by calculating effective material stresses and comparing these to available SN data. To provide worldwide access to this program, a web-based version was designed, which uses a SQL database to store all inputs and outputs, a web interface (Tomcat^®), business logic written in Java^®, and MATLAB^® to program the engineering calculations. In order to allow many users to access the system concurrently, MATLAB Production Server™ is used. Requests for calculations from the Java part of the program are sent to the input queue of MATLAB Production Server. The duration of the calculations can be anything between one second and 24 hours, depending on the size and complexity of the calculation task. There are many benefits of this design: no installation of any software on users' computers, reduced costs for software, a clean separation between the components of the system, and short response times if bug fixes or improvements to the MATLAB code is required.