Integrity constraint management for design object versions in a concurrent engineering design environment

Concurrent engineering (CE) is a product development approach which requires a collaborative multidisciplinary team environment with effective communication. Due to the evolutionary nature of the engineering design process, it is necessary to provide support for version management. The version model should be provided with an integrity checking mechanism to assure the consistency of object versions with the design constraints. Managing integrity constraints is complex due to their evolving nature and raises a number of issues that need to be dealt with. The authors present a conceptual framework for providing an integrity mechanism for object versions. The framework is based on the concept of the Constraint Version Object (CVO)