An Integration Tool for Life-Cycle Engineering

Abstract

Life-cycle engineering is the integr a ti on of the design process, which addresses primarily the system's performance , with analysis of the design 's other attributes, including reliability, maintainability, lifecycle cost, and manufacturability . The advent of symbolic approaches to design integration reveals the requirement and opportunity of using higher -level analysis to select the optimum design . This opportunity is present only when human interaction is reduced sufficiently to permit several complete design and analysis cycles to take place . We have implemented a generic integration tool that has been demonstrated to significantly shorten the design cycle, and are studying its application to life-cycle engineering. This logic-based tool regards the requested attributes as a set of uninstantiated variables and invokes external computational programs, recursively if necessary, to achieve a proof consisting of the computed variable bindings. Key Words: Software integration, engineering design, expert system.