Transaction‐Management Issues in Collaborative Engineering

Abstract

Computer‐aided collaborative engineering typically involves a group of engineers working cooperatively on distributed workstations to complete a complex design by closely interacting among themselves and dynamically sharing design data and information. Such design environments necessitate powerful data sharing, versioning and configuration management tools, network communication protocols, and a flexible framework for concurrency management of highly interleaved and interactive transactions. This paper presents a process model for collaborative‐engineering design in which design task hierarchies are mapped into a hierarchy of nested and grouped transactions, and the data base is partitioned accordingly into private, local, and global shared areas. This provides a mechanism to achieve greater concurrency and coordination in engineering design. The process model is illustrated with an example in the domain of building design and construction. It also discusses the functional requirements of supporting the proposed transaction system, such as nested, grouped and shared transactions, dynamic data‐base partitioning, communication protocols and update notification, and version management of data configurations. Finally, it discusses implementation of these features using ONTOS, a commercial object‐oriented data‐base management systems (OODBMS).