María Luciana Roldán

TracED: A tool for capturing and tracing engineering design processes

The design of products or production processes in many engineering disciplines such as chemical, or software engineering, involves many creative and sometimes unstructured activities, with an opportunistic control flow. During these design processes, several models are generated, which have different levels of abstraction of the object being designed. Given the difficulties in dealing with this complexity using an improvised way, there is an urgent need for tools that support the capture and tracing of this process. In this proposal, TracED, a computational environment to support the capture and tracing of engineering design process is presented. It allows defining a particular engineering design domain and supporting the capture of how products under development are transformed along an engineering design process. Particularly, in this work, we consider software architectures design domain. As in any complex process, the support of computational tools is required for enabling its capture.

Knowledge representation of the software architecture design process based on situation calculus

Software architecture design is an interactive, complex, decision-making process. Such a design process involves the exploration, evaluation, and composition of design alternatives. Increasingly, new computer-aided tools are available to help designers in these complex activities. However, these tools do not know how design is actually done, in other words, by means of which design activities the final artefact was obtained. In fact, the architectural design knowledge exclusively rests in the mind of designers, and there is an urgent need to move it, as much as possible, to a computer-supported environment that enables the capture of this type of knowledge. This contribution addresses this need by introducing a model for capturing how products under development are generated and transformed along the software architecture design process. The proposed model follows an operational perspective, where architectural design decisions are modelled by means of sequences of operations that are applied on the design products. Situation calculus is used to formally express the existence of an object in a given state of a design process. In addition, this formalism allows us expressing without ambiguities when an operation can be performed in a specific state of the design process.

An Operational Perspective for Capturing the Engineering Design Process

Most engineering design processes comprise knowledge-intensive and collaborative tasks. Design activities may involve many participants from various disciplines and require a team of designers and engineers with different skills to work together (Zha and Du, 2006; Wang et al., 2009). Thus, teams of human experts, in conjunction with computer-aided tools, are the ones that by, interacting cooperatively, sharing resources of various types and intermediate design products (i.e. models that are generated, detailed specifications of resulting artefacts, drawings, sketches, etc.), solve intricate problems. Accordingly, several proposals have arisen to tackle design-related issues. Most of them try to address the multiple design data representation problem that has appeared due to the various design tools used by designers during a design process (ISO 10303-1, 1994; Marquardt and Nagl, 2004; Sudarsan et al., 2005; Zha and Du, 2006). Furthermore, engineering data management systems (EDM) and product data management systems (PDM) provide assistance in managing products of a development process (e.g. models, diagrams, documentation files, etc.) along their life cycle (Chen et al., 2008). As Westfechtel (1999) has pointed out, EDM and PDM systems focus on the products of development processes, neglecting the representation of the activities that have generated them. In fact, no effective and practical system exists for capturing, storing, and retrieving design knowledge and experience in collaborative product design activities (Zha and Du, 2006; Chen et al., 2008).