Integrity validation of product data in a distributed concurrent engineering environment

Abstract

In order to accommodate today's demands of shortening product life cycle and rapid technology changes, integrated systems are being employed by manufacturers to support concurrent engineering (CE). In this paper, authors propose a distributed CE environment using STEP and database configuration methodologies. The CE environment consists of hierarchically organized database systems in which integrity of the data is maintained throughout. The working data are not allowed to be referenced by other downstream application systems until they are matured enough to be released into a global database. For efficient validation, the integrity constraints are distributed into local and global schemata. They (integrity constraints) are written in EXPRESS and are validated at both places tin local and global databases). A prototype has been built to demonstrate the major features of this distributed CE environment. By maintaining the integrity of the product data, undesirable propagation of illegal data to other application systems is prevented. Sepa-rate triggering mechanisms are devised using the dependency of constraints to three different data operations: insertion, deletion, and update.