Towards a Version and Configuration Model for Structural Design
Jamal A. Abdalla, Tilal M. Eltayeb · 2000
The structural engineering design process is incremental, multi-path and iterative. It involves trial and adjustment operations both tentatively and evolutionary. During the design of structural engineering objects, several versions and configurations (multiple occurrences of basic and compound design objects) may need to be created before the final acceptable design is committed. Clearly, the representation and manipulation of structural design objects, their versions and their configurations is not an easy task. A well thought Version and Configuration Model (VCM) need to be defined to represent and manipulate the versions and configurations of structural design objects. This paper outlines the desired features of a Version and Configuration Model for structural design objects. Specifically: (1) It defines a scheme for representing versions and configurations of structural engineering design objects. (2) It identifies a set of operations for manipulating versions of design objects. (3) It presents a prototype implementation of a simple version manager, which is built, from the representational scheme and the manipulation operations of the proposed VCM.