Design management in CONCORD: combining transaction management, workflow management and cooperation control

Design management is an encompassing task supporting cooperative design processes entirely. This requirement can best be fulfilled by exploiting concepts from transaction management, workflow management and cooperation control. On the one hand, each of these areas must be adapted to the field of design, while on the other hand, the necessity of an adequate interplay of these components reveals multiple facets of interoperability. The CONCORD (CONtrolling COopeRation in Design environments) processing model faces all these problems and allows a straightforward mapping of the processing structures predominating in design and, thus, serves as a cooperative and interoperable processing model for CAD frameworks, e.g. the PRIMA framework, our testbed and prototype system. The major contribution of the CONCORD model is to enhance design flow management by cooperation control facilities. Design flow management controls design tool applications and the interplay of tools, and supports the user in fulfilling his/her local design goal. For that purpose, it covers both transaction processing and workflow management. Cooperation control, in contrast, handles the interplay of collaborating designers or design tasks. In this paper, we report on the capabilities of the CONCORD processing model, thereby focussing on implementation aspects. The feasibility of already approved transaction concepts and workflow management as implementation basis is investigated and discussed by drawing relationships between design and transaction/workflow processing.