Global Version Management for a Federated Turbine Design Environment

Integrated engineering environments, based on federated database technology, are a means to control the integrity of and dependencies between product data created in many different engineering applications. Continuing the engineers' tradition of keeping different versions of drawings and documents, most engineering applications support the management of versions of a product and its parts. Consequently, federations in engineering environments should provide version management on their global layer in order to support homogeneous global access to versions from different local systems and to provide system-wide consistency of versioned data. This paper identifies problems which are speci c to global version management in a federated system. It then investigates and evaluates these problems and their solutions in the context of a turbine design environment. Finally, a generalisation of selected solutions for a wider range of application domains is discussed