A constraint management tool for concurrent engineering

Abstract

There are many knowledge-based systems out in industry being used to solve problems in the domains of design, planning, and scheduling. These applications have largely been developed disjointly, with no provisions for integration or information sharing. From the manufacturing point of view, several key domains consisting of design, tooling, cost analysis are considered phases of a product's life cycle. The goal of concurrent engineering is to work out manufacturing issues by considering information from different sources in parallel. Therefore, it is logical that these different knowledge-based applications should be integrated into one system. A constraint management system can help in the task of integration by providing a standard way of representing and operating on constraints that impact the problem-solving processes of several knowledge-based applications. This paper describes a constraint management system that we have developed and how it has been used to create a knowledge-based application for circuit layout design.