A STEP Entity Control System for Concurrent Engineering

The STEP Entity Control System for Concurrent Engineering (SECS/CE) is an archive and version control system that facilitates concurrent engineering by allowing engineers to merge concurrent changes, find conflicts between concurrent changes, ask questions about the contents of changes and designs, and resolve conflicts between design versions produced by concurrent changes, during the design of a product. The SECS/CE system models the contents of a design using the EXPRESS language of the STEP international standard for the exchange of engineering product data. This paper discusses the architecture of the SECS/CE system, the basic and advanced version control functionality it provides, and the graphical tools and libraries that are under development to aid the process of identifying and resolving conflicts between versions.