Managing Dependencies in Heterogeneous Design Automation Systems

Increasing competition in cost efficiency, lead-times, product quality, quotation accuracy, and abilities to provide customization drives companies toward development and adoption of new methods. To re-use knowledge gained from previous projects in order to avoid producing the same knowledge again and to circumvent previously encountered obstacles is an approach which is more or less used by most companies. Utilization of Design Automation (DA) systems in the engineering design process have proven to increase process efficiency and to enable new ways of working by systematic re-use of engineering knowledge. In order to ensure system longevity, industrial practitioners and researchers have pointed at implementation and long term management as important aspects to consider during development. The systems are often built on top of commercial software and legacy systems integrated by different types of scripts and system descriptions which becomes dependent of each other in different ways. Changes made during maintenance in one of these artifacts propagates through the dependency structure making traceability and transparency key factors for keeping the system valid over time. This paper presents a description of the problem in a real industrial setting together with a suggestion of an approach, based on set-up and management of dependencies between sections inside and across different types of system components, which is aimed to aid implementation and management of DA tools. A prototype system which informs the user, of functional sections related to a functional section to be updated, have been developed. The prototype is applied on a multidisciplinary heterogeneous system environment used for simulation based knowledge build up and concept evaluations of jet engine components.