A GRAPH-BASED SYSTEM FOR MANAGING CONFIGURATIONS OF ENGINEERING DESIGN DOCUMENTS

Abstract

Due to increasing complexity of hardware and software systems, configuration management has been receiving more and more attention in nearly all engineering domains (e.g. electrical, mechanical, and software engineering). This observation has driven us to develop a domain-independent and adaptable configuration management model (called CoMa) for managing systems of engineering design documents. The CoMa model integrates composition hierarchies, dependencies, and versions into a coherent framework based on a sparse set of essential configuration management concepts. In order to give a clear and comprehensible specification, the CoMa model is defined in a high-level, multi-paradigm specification language (PROGRES) which combines concepts from various disciplines (database systems, knowledge-based systems, graph rewriting systems, programming languages). Finally, we also present an implementation which conforms to the formal specification and provides graphical, structure-oriented tools offering a bunch of sophisticated commands and operating in a heterogeneous environment.