Distributed constraint management for collaborative engineering databases
Ashish Kumar Gupta, Sanjai Tiwari · 1993
The engineering design process, such as airplane or building design, involves the participation of many independent specialists who need to share information stored in several autonomous design databases. To insure consistency of the final design, high-level constraints need to be defined and enforced on the design objects stored in these preexisting databases. The constraints need to be verified when the participating databases are updated. In this paper, we present an architecture of a distributed constraint management system that checks design constraints on preexisting autonomous databases. The architecture emphasizes independence of constraint management from the underlying databases systems to avoid compromising site autonomy. To provide this independence, we present a declarative constraint language for specifying constraints, which facilitates compile time optimizations such as constraint fragmentation and local validation strategies. We also support set-oriented updates that ...