Abstract:
Engineering design process has an evolutionary and
iterative nature as design artifacts develop through
series of changes before the final solution is achieved.
Design is performed based on design requirements which
are mainly specified as restrictions on the properties of
the design artifact, and are considered to be design
constraints.
A common problem encountered during the design
process is that of constraint evolution, which may involve
the identification of new constraints and modification or
omission of existing constraints for a number of reasons.
These reasons would include changes in customer
requirements, changes in the technology, change in the
production cost or to improve the performance. As
design is an evolutionary process where a solution is
sought by trial and error, integrity constraints in
engineering design will not remain fixed but will tend to
evolve during the design process. This evolving nature of
constraints has made the support for automatic integrity
validation, non-trivial as it imposes number of key issues
that need to be dealt with.
We have been able to successfully address these issues
with respect to the engineering design environment and
we identify how one could meet the challenges through
effective management of these evolving constraints for
engineering designs. Thus the original design will
continue to exist while supporting the creation of new
design versions to meet the changes.
