A. Demaid et J. Zucker, COMPOSING AND COMBINING COMPLEX DESIGNS FROM DIFFERENT PROJECT PERSPECTIVES, International journal of computer integrated manufacturing, 9(6), 1996, pp. 454-462
Citations number
12
Categorie Soggetti
Computer Sciences","Computer Science Interdisciplinary Applications","Engineering, Manufacturing","Operatione Research & Management Science
A set of data manipulation and visualization tools is presented that a
ct over engineering information fi om separate sources representing di
fferent perspectives on the same problem. The information is in the fo
rm of low-level transmitted data and enhanced data in the form of sepa
rate hierarchies that can be created independently by different (teams
of) users ol by enhancing the low-level, external data while maintain
ing the external relationship for tl le purpose of updating. The separ
ation of hierarchies appeals to some fairly pragmatic technological or
scientific principles from the domain in question, The POISE mechanis
m presented here provides a way in in which these organizationally dis
tinct, discipline-specific information hierarchies can be accessed whe
n answering a query and visualized for browsing orediting purposes. Th
e control over this system of intercommunication between separate pers
pectives is by a system of message delegation. Responsibility for resp
onding to a message passes around a small society of active objects th
at call each contribute their own partial knowledge. This technique of
allowing objects to offer part of the answer to one original query ma
rks a considerable expansion of tile features of a design or project d
atabase. The importance of a scheme of message delegation, such as the
one implemented in POISE, is that concurrent engineering projects fre
quently need to work with well organized but partial information sourc
es, Manufacturing, product, and materials information manipulated for
engineering decision-making purposes is used to exemplify this general
-purpose representational system for partial descriptions.