Organizing engineering designs and design techniques

The authors present an approach to organizing engineering designs and design techniques in a database system. This database system stores existing designs and provides a mechanism for capturing the design process in the database. The authors develop the notions of assembly objects and component objects, define the idea of design dependencies among objects and explain dependencies in terms of constraints. They also develop a representation of design techniques, show a representation of design objects, techniques, and dependencies, and present a scenario for performing designs. Dependencies between objects are recognized and treated uniformly as objects in a database. It is pointed out how this environment may be used for conducting the design process by selection of components