Design Management Using Dynamically Defined Flows

Many CAD frameworks now use the notion of a design flow to help provide methodology management services. Most flow-based approaches are limited, however, in that they involve a fixed sequence of operations specified in advance, restrict designers to using only those flows, and "hardwire" specific tools to flows. To overcome this, we introduce the concept of "dynamically defined flows" as tool-independent flows that are built up, on demand, by designers. Dynamically defined flows can be used to provide a semantically rich means for browsing the design history database as well as to provide support for multiple design approaches, such as goal-based, tool-based, data-based and plan-based design.