Design Flow Management in Concurrent Engineering Environments

Abstract

In this paper DECOR, a configurable integrated design flow mangement component that provides online monitoring and control of concurrent design processes, is described. Manipulations of data objects with arbitrary granularity from files or directories down to single structures can be considered. DECOR is based on extended Predicate Transition Nets as modelling paradigm. 1 Introduction Current development trends show that the complexity of the design process is steadily increasing. Thereby also the need for computer based support of design flow and methodology management is increased. This is mainly due to the following reasons. In integrated design environments usually more than one tool is available for the same design task, making it infeasible for a single designer to know which tools are available, which inputs they need, and when a tool can be called. A second reason, even more crucial for the complexity of design processes, is the increasing size and complexity of design problem..