SPECIFICATION AND COORDINATION OF LONG-RUNNING DESIGN ACTIVITIES FOR CAD ENVIRONMENTS

Abstract

This paper presents a new transaction management scheme, LOT, for coordinating design activities in CAD environments. Unlike the previous approaches for coordinating design activities, in which each designer faces complexity of a design activity, LOT encapsulates this complexity from designers. This is achieved by two notions: (1) transaction template that guides the designer not to produce incorrect design results due to misunderstanding of complex design activities, and (2) interleaving specification that enables the designer to cooperate with his/her group members in a consistent way. LOT also contains a new concurrency control scheme, called semantic concurrency control, which takes advantage of interleaving specification. In LOT, therefore, any designer does not need to know the details of the design activity, and also does not need to concern about the moment of release for his/her intermediate results.