Information Management for Engineering Design

Computer-aided design syst, ems have become a big business. Advances in technology have made it commercially feasible to place a powerful engineering workstation on every designers desk. A major selling point for these workstations is the computer- aided design software they provide, rather than the actual hardware. The trade magazines are full of advertisements promising full menu design systems, complete with an integrated database (preferably "relational"). What does it all mean? This book focuses on the critical issues of managing the information about a large design project. While undeniably one of the most important areas of CAD, it is also one of the least understood. Merely glueing a database system to a set of existing tools is not a solution. Several additional system components must be built to create a true design management system. These are described in this book. The book has been written from the viewpoint of how and when to apply database technology to the problems encountered by builders of computer-aided design systems. Design systems provide an excellent environment for discovering how far we can generalize the existing database concepts for non-commercial applications. This has emerged as a major new challenge for database system research. We have attem- pted to avoid a "database egocentric" view by pointing out where existing database technology is inappropriate for design systems, at least given the current state of the database art. Acknowledgements.