A system for design and concurrent engineering under imprecision

This paper proposes an approach to handling imprecision in design and concurrent engineering systems by using interval analysis and constraint networks. By allowing design parameters to be specified with intervals rather than exact points, this approach permits designers to iteratively transform vague conceptual designs into detailed final designs. When a designer changes a variable's interval or assigns a value, the results are propagated through constraints and the resulting feasible interval for all other dependent variables is pruned. The interval constraint network approach described in this paper extends previous work by allowing the representation of and reasoning about complex constraints involving conditions, conjunctions and disjunctions, as well as both symbolic and numeric variables. Many concurrent engineering constraints cannot be modeled without this sort of representational flexibility. A prototype of this approach has been implemented in a system called SPARK-IP. The operation of SPARK-IP is demonstrated through a concurrent engineering design problem involving printed wiring boards.

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