SYMPOSIUM MINISYMPOSIA

ABSTRACT

The paper discusses a cooperative engineering design process in which the iterative search for the final design is necessary. The iterative process of engineering design should result in finding values of parameters fully describing the system. Nature of these parameters, called design parameters can be quite different: material, geometrical, electrical, architectural, etc. The design process is preceded by the detailed analysis of physical phenomena resulting in specification of constraints on the design parameters. The engineering system has some behavioral properties. We refer to such properties as output characteristics. The application/market/utility requirements for the engineering product result in some constraints on output characteristics. The goal of an iterative engineering design is to obtain, through iterations, design parameters satisfying constraints on design parameters and constraints on output characteristics.

An overview of software systems for iterative engineering design is given in the literature. Generally, they consist of several modules including a single designer interface module and an iterative computations module. In this paper we present a system consisting of several design interface modules and several iterative computations modules. Such a system allows many designers to cooperate in the process of specifying or changing design decisions in any phase of the design process. Different interaction modes between the designers are presented.

There are several problems that need to be resolved when building such a system. First, it is necessary to adhere to some guidelines concerning version control. Although, in general, a designer has the ability to alter another designer’s design parameters, all changes must be saved as a different version number. Next, the synchronization between different modules needs to be specified correctly. That includes synchronization between design interface modules and synchronization between a design interface module(s) and an iterative computations module(s).

We discuss two modes of interactions between designers. The first mode is when we can identify a main designer and co-designers for a specific design. This mode is called a centralized mode. In this mode any changes to the design require an explicit permission from the main designer. The second, decentralized mode is when all designers have the same privileges except that each version of a design is “owned” by a single designer and the suspending of that design require consultation with the “owner”. These two modes result in two different synchronization protocols. The synchronization protocols are specified using the state diagram method.

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