Infrastructure for Integrated, Heterogeneous Engineering Databases and Design Histories

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This research investigates an advanced heterogeneous database environment for engineering design, with emphasis on using design knowledge and relating design decisions to design versions. The environment uses a blackboard approach to coordinate, integrate, and monitor product development. An object-oriented database provides an integrated, logical view of complex design entities that are stored in a variety of databases. Designers therefore have a global view of how heterogeneous data repositories form the complete product design. The blackboard also coordinates access to expert systems and deductive databases to provide engineering design knowledge. Design histories are captured as a series of design development steps and the corresponding engineering knowledge is used in each step and resulting decision. Both navigational and knowledge-based approaches to querying design histories are used. The impact of this research on database technology will be the advancement of heterogeneous databases through the use of object-oriented concepts to achieve a tightly-coupled view of design data. Object-oriented concepts will also be extended with a process model for capturing and querying design histories. This research will also lead to the improvement of the engineering design productivity by providing an integrated view of design knowledge and data and by supporting the ability to query design histories allowing re-use of previous designs.