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Abstract : |
When an artifact is designed nowadays the typical output of this activity includes blueprints, CAD files, manufacturing plans and other documents describing the final result of a long series of deliberations and tradeoffs by the participants of concurrent engineering (CE) teams. The underlying intent and logical support (i.e.therationale) for the decisions captured therein is usually lost, or is represented at best as a scattered collection of paper documents, project and personal notebook entries as well as the recollections of the artifact?s designers. This design rationale information can be very difficult to access by human agents and is represented such that computers can provide little support for managing and utilizing it. The challenges of intensified global competition and the growing complexity of the artifacts we design are making it increasingly critical that design rationale be captured in a highly usable form. The potential benefits of such capture are manifold. Explicitly represented rationale can help individual designers clarify their thinking about a design [12, 5, 7, 6]. Perhaps more importantly, rationale capture can support design by CE teams over time. The reasoning behind decisions becomes available for all team members to critique and augment [5]. Participants affected by design changes can be identified readily [6]. Existing designs which addressed similar requirements can be, |
