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Object-Oriented Versioning in a Distributed Concurrent Engineering Design Environment

Abdlulrahman Al-Khudair
( Saudi )

Cardiff University
Computer Science Dept. Cardiff University PO Box 916 Cardiff CF24 3XF UK
tel:
fax:
a.i.khudair@cs.cf.ac.uk

Keywords:

databases distribution

Abstract:

Concurrent Engineering (CE) has received considerable attention in recent years due to its efficiency in time and cost reduction in the product development phases (i.e. Requirement Definition, Conceptual Design, Detailed Design, Development, Manufacturing, Marketing, and Support). CE achieved major improvements by conducting these phases concurrently rather than sequentially. This leads to a consideration, during the upstream phases, of all the elements (or phases) of the product development from conceptual design to marketing.

During the CE process, many changes are made to the design artefact and a large amount of data and other information passes between the participants. The management of both simultaneous tasks as well as keeping the history of design changes (versions) is still a difficult problem which may not be solved using CAD systems alone. This is because they lack the support of a powerful management system that can integrate and track all the phases and states of a large and complex design artefact. Hence, a management tool (i.e. database system) is essential for keeping track of the evolution and change of design objects as well as improving the communication and cooperation in a distributed CE design environment.

Conventional database systems, supporting record-based applications, are considered unable to satisfy the requirements of engineering applications. For this reason, advanced database systems that can handle such requirements are needed. Object-Oriented Database (OODB) systems are considered capable of satisfying the requirements of engineering applications since they possess rich modeling and manipulation features. A very important semantic extension in these systems is version management. The notion of version is a widely accepted mechanism for recording the design evolution which enables design reuse. In the CE design environment, CAD systems are used to manipulate the geometrical aspects of the design object whereas the OODB system is used as a kernel to store design objects and keep track of the overall hierarchy of design objects (or structure), design evolution (or versioning), and the relationships between design objects as well as constraints on them. Hence, CAD systems are used as front end that is built on top of back end OODB system in a distributed CE design environment. This will enable the persistence of design objects.

The aim of the PhD research is to investigate the use of OODB semantic extensions of version and configuration management to control and facilitate design evolution process in a distributed CE design environment. This will enable design reuse as well as improving the communication and cooperation among multidisciplinary teams. Furthermore, heterogeneity is supported not only for the design tools but also for different platforms of distributed OODB system, rather than changing the preferred design tools of individual designer.

This work is part of the DESCRIBE project and is partially supported by EPSRC.

The PhD work started: February 1999

The submitted work will probably not be presented in the
upcoming ECOOP PhD Workshop.

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Last modified on Mon Aug 15 14:59:24 2005