This article discusses the increasing importance of information to so called information factories. As information management is their core competence, development of information quality should be the key focus of quality management. Good quality information is error free and fulfills the user’s needs. Technology managers define their needs as having recent, relevant, reliable and analyzed information on competitive environment and development of technologies. Several methods used with full text search engines to improve different aspects of information quality, are demonstrated and described based on our constructive work, implementing Business Technology portals. Relevancy of information was improved with several used methods and reliability by structured searches with meta‐information and by reduced information space. Recentness of information was improved with push technology. As conclusion, full‐text search engines increase the information quality by filtering information, however recentness of information and analyzed information are more difficult aspects to improve than relevancy and reliability.

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Constraints provide declarative descriptions of important requirements related to engineering projects. Most existing algorithms for constraint satisfaction require input consisting of binary constraints on variables that have discrete values. Such restrictions limit their use in engineering since complex constraints, involving several variables that have discrete and numeric values, are common. This paper provides an approach for decision support through approximating solution spaces that are defined by constraints. Our algorithm is not limited to a specific type of constraint, but handles numeric and discrete variables in the same framework. Since a new type of local consistency narrows down the search space effectively, full-scale engineering tasks, such as designs involving hundreds of variables, are accommodated without excessive computational complexity. The approach is demonstrated for selection of appropriate wind bracing for single story steel-framed buildings. Results may be used for input into other tools containing algorithms such as those offering (i) higher levels of consistency, (ii) optimally directed point-solution search, and (iii) simulation behaviour.Finally, extension to dynamic constraint satisfaction using different combinations of activation conditions is straightforward. It is expected that this approach will improve the performance of many existing and future computeraided engineering tools.