Concurrent engineering requires the simultaneous consideration of a huge diversity of issues regarding a given object under design. Successful support for concurrent engineering requires a conceptually integrated environment that can address this diversity of issues and assist with the detection and resolution of conflicts among design constraints and decisions. The Automated Constraint Refinement and Assessment Tool (AutoCRAT) is a generic tool for the top-down refinement and bottom-up validation of design constraints. AutoCRAT supports the diversity of issues that arise in a concurrent engineering environment because constraints can address any aspect of the product under design and because constraints can be expressed in any language, including natural language. The focus of this paper is on the structuring facility of AutoCRAT that supports a userdefined organizational structure for constraints. This structure allows constraints to be flagged, annotated, browsed, and queried. This paper describes how the structuring facility of AutoCRAT supports conflict detection.
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