Modeling Design Versions

Due to the evolutionary nature of the design process, engineering design databases need to provide adequate support for versioning of designs corresponding to their different st.ages of evolution. Existing mechanisms of class and object versioning in Object-Oriented Databases fail to capture the design process as a concept in its Fnt.irety. For instance, a new class or object version does not always imply that it is a new design. Further, semantic information regarding each version of a component needs to be captured. The versioning mechanism must also capture the interdependencies between the designs of various components. In this paper, we propose a model to cap ture versioning of designs in Object-Oriented Databases based on the concepts of Design Attributes, Design Equivalences and Design Versions. The proposed model achieves Design Versioning through Semantic Classes and Version Reference Classes.