Multiple Design and Analysis Applications
Notes:
- Although both the design and the analysis representations are views of the same product, they describe it at very different levels of semantic content.
- Obtaining the latter from the first is normally a difficult task.
- The unstructured development of computer-aided design and analysis systems over the years has made it difficult to integrate both the systems themselves and the information they manipulate (islands of automation).
- As a result, even though there is a large number of sophisticated computer aided engineering tools available, the current status is that typically design and analysis software tools are not compatible enough to exchange data directly without cumbersome (manual or semi-automatic) transformation.
- In many cases, data needed by the analysis models has to be manually retrieved and re-inputted in some other computer application for analysis.
- Some raw design information must undergo significant transformation, simplification and/or idealization before being fed into the analysis models on which the analysis applications are based.
- In addition, in a real scenario, the development of a product requires participation of designers from several disciplines who use a wide variety of independent software systems. These multiple design applications generate a large and complex aggregation of diverse design information, scattered across several data sets with different, often proprietary, formats and data structures.