Formal Management of CAD/CAM Processes

Systematic engineering design processes have many aspects in common with software engineering, with CAD/CAM objects replacing program code as the implementation stage of the development. They are, however, currently considerably less formal. We propose to draw on the mentioned similarities and transfer methods from software engineering to engineering design in order to enhance in particular the reliability and reusability of engineering processes. We lay out a vision of a document-oriented design process that integrates CAD/CAM documents with requirement specifications; as a first step towards supporting such a process, we present a tool that interfaces a CAD system with program verification workflows, thus allowing for completely formalised development strands within a semi-formal methodology.