An Integration Tool for Life-Cycle Engineering

Abstract

Life-cycle engineering is the integration 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.