Demeter-a design methodology and environment

The Demeter project tries to provide a framework for digital design and to define an integrated environment which will support the whole range of design activities. This report describes D0, the preliminary phase of the Demeter project. D0 is an experiment in communication among existing tools in a specific design domain (reliability analysis). The selected tools execute on different computer systems and use widely different data representations. D0 provides a unifying framework which allows isolated tools to cooperate in a useful way and makes the underlying structure invisible to the user. 10 references.