OVERVIEW OF ENTITY-BASED INTEGRATED DESIGN PRODUCT AND PROCESS MODELS

The development of computer-integrated systems for engineering design requires models to describe and organize the information and activitie s involved in design. A product model describes the information create d during the design process, and a process model describes the associa ted design activities. Product and process models can be integrated in to a single model. An entity-based approach is one way to carry out th is integration. An entity-based integrated model uses product entities and process entities to represent design information and design activ ities, respectively. The relationships among these entities include or ganizational, interaction and sequence relationships. Organizational r elationships organize entities into hierarchies, interaction relations hips characterize the nature of entity interactions, and sequence rela tionships identify the sequences in which process entities are initiat ed during the design process. This paper presents an overview of the p roduct and process entities, and the organizational, interaction and s equence relationships of entity-based integrated design product and pr ocess models. Formal concepts and notation used to represent these ent ities and relationships are described using a simple design example. ( C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Limited. All rights reserved.