Reuse of design objects in CAD frameworks

The reuse of well-tested and optimized design objects is an important aspect for decreasing design times, increasing design quality, and improving the predictability of designs. Reuse spans from the selecting cells from a library up to adapting already designed objects. In this paper, we present a new model for reusing design objects in CAD frameworks. Based on experiences in other disciplines, mainly in software engineering and case-based reasoning, we developed a feature-based model to describe design objects and their similarities. Our model considers generic modules as well as multi-functional units. We discuss the relationships of the model to design process and to the configuration hierarchy of complex design objects. We examined our model with the prototype system RODEO.