Multiple Perspectives of Design Objects

Abstract

The process of large scale design decomposes into a number of specialized tasks, each requiring its own representation of the design. It is important to maintain consistency among the different representations of a design. In this paper, we describe an approach to the creation of specialized representations that addresses the problems of incorporating behavior and relationships while maintaining consistency among different representations. We call a specialized representation a perspective, which is defined as a partition of the global schema that supports some functionally-oriented task. Each perspective corresponds to some stage in the design process. In this project, we are concentrating on how multiple representations of a design may be formed, how they relate to one another in terms of structure and behavior, and how they relate to the entire design process. We are building a prototype of a system which supports the creation and maintenance of perspectives. This system will consist of a perspective definition facility that allows a new perspective, including derived classes to be specified and a perspective maintenance facility which keeps the different representations consistent with each other.