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
