In today's engineering design environment, designers are limited in their ability to maximize reuse by the fact that there is no efficient way to search for, access, and integrate reusable design objects across multiple sources; frequently, these potential sources of reusable design data are uncoupled from the design environment. This paper details an approach for managing reusable design objects in a collaborative engineering environment that enables Rapid Prototyping of Application-Specific Signal Processors (RASSP) and the architecture of the RASSP Reuse Data Manager (RRDM), specifically developed to support this approach.
Key aspects of our approach include:
The RASSP reuse processes were developed using the IDEF3 methodology for process modeling. The models specify the essential activities to be performed when designing for and with reuse. These generic processes may be adapted by an organization implementing design reuse and customized to their specific needs.
The RASSP Reuse Classification Hierarchy (RRCH) was initially developed using Rumbaugh's Object Modeling Technique (OMT). Subsequently, it was reorganized and extended as a set of ontology components using the Ontolingua toolset developed by the Stanford University Knowledge Systems Laboratory (KSL). The RRCH defines the terms relevant to the domain and the relationships among them to assist a designer in searching for and selecting design objects from the reuse repository. The focus of the RRCH development has been on the electronics design domain. Although, this approach applies to many other engineering and integrated manufacturing domains.
Sources of reusable designs may include those created within an engineering design organization, CAD tool libraries, CAD tool-independent libraries, released designs managed by product data management (PDM) systems across the enterprise, related business and engineering information, and component vendor data, among others. To query and access these heterogeneous sources of design data, the RRDM provides designers with a common view of the virtual reuse repository. Syntactic and semantic differences among the various source file systems, libraries and repositories are resolved through a common vocabulary representing their union and mapping algorithms that relate the source vocabularies to the common view. An ontology for a particular source repository defines the relevant terms for that source -- identifying attributes of the terms, relationships among terms, and constraints that pertain to those terms. We describe in this paper the architecture and concept of operations of the environment that we are building to support legacy data integration using knowledge-based representation and standards-based enterprise integration concepts.
Incremental versions of the reuse processes, ontology components and RRDM functions were demonstrated for the commercial space communications domain (Lockheed Martin Astrospace Company) and for the VHDL model development and reuse domain. The VHDL model application supports model repositories at Lockheed Martin ATL, SCRA, and several universities. In this paper we will describe the specific processes applied and the lessons learned from the exercise.
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1.0 Introduction
2.0 Architecture of the RASSP Enterprise System
3.0 Design Reuse Methodology
4.0 The RASSP Reuse Classification Hierarchy
5.0 The RASSP Reuse Data Manager Architecture
6.0 Application of the RASSP Reuse Approach
7.0 Conclusion
8.0 References
Approved for Public Release; Distribution Unlimited Dennis Basara