Methodologies for Maintaining and Comparing Designs in a Cooperative Design Environment

Abstract

This thesis examinedl the problem of how to support several designers working on one or more project s so that they can pool their design ideas and produce improved designs from wmparing and integrating various designs. The core of the syetem is a design repitory based on the triangle madel, which stores the designs and computes the differences hetween them. The designs are rep resented as sets of features and a language (FBSM) is provided to describe them. Meta-features can be defined so that designs can be viewed at different levels of abstraction and formed into groups.