AUTOMATED DESIGN MANAGEMENT USING TRACES

The productivity of modern CAD systems can be increased by a layer of software, called the ''automatic design manager,'' whose goal is to provide services such as automatic sequencing and scheduling of tools, coordination of team design, and tracking of the design activity for documentation purposes. An automatic management system for CAD is proposed, based on the idea that CAD tools can leave a trace of their execution. The trace, represented as a bipartite directed and acyclic graph in which the nodes represent either design data or tool invocations, is both a record of the design activity and a graph representing the dependencies among the design objects. The architecture of the proposed system is distributed: A server manages the trace, while a number of clients can concurrently interact with the trace through the server. The system is nonintrusive, because it does not affect the way designers interact with the tools. The design manager has been implemented in a system called VOV, which has been tested by novice and expert designers. The results of these tests are reported.