The world-wide competitive economy is forcing us to utilize fully the best equipment and techniques available with efficient control of organizational structure to produce high quality, well-designed products at lower prices and in less time. Increasing awareness is being directed to the product design phase, because the more advanced CIM technologies are of little consequence unless the product design lends itself to the overall system utilizing all available and relevant technologies. For instance, the following statements represent the significance of product design.

Principles of concurrent engineering

Product development teams practicing concurrent engineering are responsible for creating, disseminating, maintaining, and venfying requirements that span the full product life cycle, including manufacturing, reliability, maintainability, and environmental safety. This is a complex task that requires automated support; however, the state-of-the-art of computer-aided requirements management is relatively immature. This paper sets forth a broad set of concepts for requirements management automation, and illustrates their implementation in the Requirements Manager system developed under the DARPA Initiative in Concurrent Engineering. Requirements management automation will make possible a more structured product development process and, at the same time, a more effective intergration of humans and machines that reduces product development cost and cycle time while improving product quality.

Computer-aided Requirements Management:

The development of a system engineering environment called ABE, a Better Environment, as part of the strategic computing program of the US Dept. of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is described. The goal was to create technologies and methodologies for building cooperative, intelligent systems with modular, heterogeneous components. The motivating problems are discussed. The specific needs of intelligent-system developers that the work addressed and the key technical approaches that were adopted are examined. The ABE software system is described. As an example of the use of ABE, PMR, a system for plan monitoring and replanning, is presented. The lessons learned in developing ABE and the issues remaining to be addressed are discussed. >

Frameworks for developing intelligent systems: The ABE systems engineering environment

This paper describes the tight coupling between design and data modeling and management facilities in the STAR EDA framework. STAR implements an innovative and exible data model that allows the user to de ne, for each object type, a schema of the design alternatives and views to be created during the design process. Alternatives and views can be hierarchically related through an inheritance mechanism in order to establish arbitrary data integrity constraints that must be followed when new object descriptions are generated. On-they extensions and modi cations to each object schema are supported by a schema evolution mechanism. The evolutionary schemata of alternatives and views and the integrity constraints that are established through the object schemata build the basis for a design methodology management mechanism.

A tightly coupled approach to design and data management

We have devised an improved methodology for managing CAD resources--the tool and data abstractions that form the basis of tool integration efforts. The methodology permits many different abstracted views to coexist within the same CAD framework. This makes it easier to customize a CAD framework for a view that captures the needs of local designers, yet populate the same framework with CAD tools that have been encapsulated for other views. A client/server based tool communication strategy and a novel user interface management system, both operating in terms of abstracted tool and data entities, further increase CAD tool portability and framework openness in modern, distributed computing environments. The methodology also provides the primitives to support advanced task management and design process management systems.

Resource management for CAD frameworks

The design of today's electronic systems involves the use of a growing number of complex CAD tools. Invoking and controlling these tools, independently or as part of a captured, multi-operation flow, remains an error-prone and largely unsolved problem. This problem is the focus of the Design Methodology Management Technical Subcommittee (DMMTSC) of the CAD Framework Initiative. This paper describes the DMM problem, establishes DMM requirements, and presents the state of the DMMTSC effort to define interface standards for proposed solutions.

Eileen B. Perez

Papers

Design methodology management-a CAD framework initiative perspective