Object-Oriented Database Support for Computer-Aided Control System Design

Abstract The need for database support for design applications has long been identified. The requirement is for a system in which the designer can efficiently and easily manage information from a variety of sources and integrate with existing and new Computer-Aided Control System Design (CACSD) tools. The problem with traditional database systems is that they do not readily support design data, which consists of many different types of information with complex relationships between these types. The object-oriented model can represent complex design components more directly than traditional systems and the user view of the world is similar to the higher level of abstraction provided by an object-oriented system. This not only allows the designer to set up the database simply in the first instance, but to extend the database setup for his particular needs. It is important that the database functions do not need to be re-written each time a change is made to the functionality of existing software and that new tools can be incorporated into the model with relative ease. To standardise on a data exchange method would help to alleviate this problem. One emerging ISO standard in this area is STEP. This paper describes an object-oriented data management system which has been designed for CACSD. The emerging STEP data exchange standard is discussed and how this can be implemented in an object-oriented database.