Managing complexity in a CAD environment

Today, the product design process, particularly in mechanical design, is characterized by two important transformations. On one hand, concurrent engineering increases the diversity and number of information. On the other hand, the design process use a large number of computational tools. Therefore, the product is represented many times, often by geometrical models with different formats, and different detail levels. These numerous product representations obviously raise the product complexity management. This paper presents an approach to model interactions between trade tools by representing relationships among trade information in a constraint hierarchical graph. This permits to manage product coherency by tracing or propagating a modification through all trades.