VERSION MANAGEMENT NEEDS FOR STRUCTURAL-ENGINEERING DESIGN

As design objects are created during the design process, it is not sufficient to represent only a single current state of each object. Instead, it will usually be necessary to represent a number of past and current states, existing parallel to each other at various design stages. This requirement has led to the development of various schemes to help manage and control multiple occurrences of a design object. In this paper "versions" of structural engineering design objects are defined and a scheme for organizing these versions is proposed. A design for a version manager in an object-based design system is then presented. The manager has limited capabilities but can be used as a step toward defining a more complete version management and control system.