Automated Configuration Management in Concurrent Engineering Projects

A large engineering project involves participation of many engineers from multiple disciplines The participating engineers work concurrently on their respective designs, and the large amount of data associated with their discipline-specific designs requires efficient data and configuration management support throughout the design process. One of the essential aspects of configuration management is the detection, notification, and resolution of design inconsistencies in a configuration of project databases This paper proposes automated configuration management based on design databases which represent discipline-specific designs in a project, and specified constraints which represent the requirements on these designs A DCV approach consisting of databases (D), constraints (C), and violations (V) is presented In engineering projects, both the data and constraints should scale as the project progresses and, therefore, this approach makes the constraints persistent in the databases to allow efficient storage and management of both the data and constraints The violations identify inconsistencies and store the results of the constraint checking process on configuration databases Early identification and notification of design inconsistencies will result in consistent project configurations with fewer design changes and less engineering reworks