A conceptual model for design management

Design management is a very important topic for every state-of-the-art CAD/CAE environment. By definition, the concept of design management addresses a set of functions which build, maintain, display, manage and enforce relationships among the data and among the design tools that are involved in a project. From this definition, straightforward user and functional requirements are derived. Then, a model which fulfils many of the requirements, especially in the data management part, is described. All the considerations are free from implementation details, so that modelling topics are not confused with programming problems. Our analysis is mapped on electronic hardware design; most of the concepts, however, are valid also in many other engineering fields.