A Schema-Based Approach to CAD Task Management

CAD frameworks are expected to provide a broad spectrum of services to designers and CAD system developers, including tool integration, data management, process management, and methodology management. One of the difficulties in realizing this overall goal is the wide variation in requirements for modeling the information associated with each of these services, and the rough or nonexistent interfaces between them. One such gray area is the conceptual gap between tool invocation and higher level design methodology management. To address this issue, we have introduced the notion of tool-independent CAD tasks as an intermediate representation. A new information model, called the task schema, is used to capture the dependencies between classes of tool and data objects for a given design domain. In this paper, we describe the task schema information model, and present its role in managing design activity in the Hercules CAD Task Management System.