Abstract
Engineering design is a collaborative and evolutionary process, involving designers from many disciplines. It is traditionally performed as a series of consecutive tasks, with any failures causing control to be passed back to the preceding task. If some or all of the design phases are able to be executed concurrently instead of sequentially, major improvements can be achieved. This approach is called Concurrent Engineering. This paper defines an object Versioning System to Support Collaborative Design within a Concurrent Engineering context. An initial model of this system based on a three-level hierarchical partition of the engineering database and five different version states of design artefact, was tested in a collaborative bridge design experiment. The results of the experiment showed that this model was useful, but several improvements were needed. The presented version of this system is the initial model augmented with extra functionality identified by the experiment. The implementation of this system in an OODBMS is discussed.
The work reported in this paper, is part of the DESCRIBE project, and is partially supported by EPSRC.
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© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Santoyridis, I., Carnduff, T.W., Gray, W.A., Miles, J.C. (1997). An object Versioning system to support collaborative design within a Concurrent Engineering context. In: Small, C., Douglas, P., Johnson, R., King, P., Martin, N. (eds) Advances in Databases. BNCOD 1997. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1271. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-63263-8_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-63263-8_21
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