No abstract

A significant number of companies are reengineering their business to be more effective and productive. Consequently, existing applications must be modified, and new applications must be written. The new applications typically run in a distributed and heterogeneous environment, performing single tasks in parallel, and demanding special transaction functionality for the supporting environments. Workflow-based applications offer this type of capability. In this paper, their principal advantages are derived and set in context to transaction, object, and CASE (computer-assisted software engineering) technology. In particular, a method is proposed to develop these workflow-based applications in a cohesive and consistent way.

The paper presents an implementation for computer-aided design with dimensional parameters. The approach is based on the use of an expert system to uncouple constraint equations, and to find a possible sequence for the computation of the geometric elements for given dimension values. A set of rules for the expert system is described that solves the problem for 2D designs. The method is illustrated on an example design.