THE SHARED DESIGN MANAGER - INTEROPERABILITY IN ENGINEERING DESIGN

This paper describes a multidatabase environment that supports integra tion and communication between computer-aided design (CAD) tools in an engineering design environment. Our specific approach uses an object- oriented database system as a shared design manager (SDM). The SDM pro vides a blackboard for communication among CAD tools that uses the STE P (Standard for the Exchange of Product Data) product model as a globa l conceptual view of data. A unique aspect of the SDM is the flexibili ty that it provides in configuration of the design environment and in establishing communication. We have developed a meta data component th at not only stores information about the global view of the design, bu t also serves as an interface description repository. Different aspect s of the global view can be dynamically associated with specific inter faces. Information about operations associated with each interface can also be dynamically defined. Since the environment uses dynamic bindi ng techniques for operation calls, interface and operation description s can easily be modified, and new descriptions can be added to the env ironment at any time. The flexibility provided by this approach enhanc es interoperability among the tools of the environment and makes it ea sy to configure different sets of design tools, thus providing a more open architecture for communication in engineering design. This paper also addresses the use of schema evolution concepts to keep the tempor ary object storage component of the SDM up-to-date as CAD tool interfa ces are modified, added, and deleted. (C) 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.