Design Process Management

The objective of this article is to develop an electronic collaborative environment supporting cross‐disciplinary heterogeneous computer‐aided design (CAD) use. Design information flows, as a result of concurrent execution of an open‐ended set of applications, require both better communication and control for design effectiveness. This work reviews current capabilities in database transactions to support CAD/CAM and proposes a new architecture to support missing capabilities. In this article we outline the use of a process management module within a product modeling environment. The management and control of design information flows are addressed at three levels of abstraction: a conceptual framework for specifying and reasoning about design transactional flows, a comprehensive distributed object model of design processes, and a client‐server network‐based computing infrastructure supporting the process model.