Authors: Jeevani S. Goonetillake, Tom W. Carnduff
Tags: 2002, conceptual modeling
Artifacts in engineering design are structurally complex and may be represented in software as recursively composite objects. Due to the evolutionary nature of the design process each artifact and its components may evolve through several versions. This paper describes enhanced database system facilities that are used to group mutually consistent component versions together into useful configurations. The versioning system includes integrity management facilities that allow evolving design constraints to be captured flexibly at individual component/object level. In order to permit evolution, integrity constraints are represented within versionable objects, so-called constraint version objects (CVOs). Inter-dependency constraints can be modelled to express the consistency semantics necessary to combine component artifact versions into useful configurations. The evolution of these configurations can be captured in the database, as configurations are also represented as versioned objects.Read the full paper here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-45275-1_8
