a b s t r a c tA mechatronic system is a synergistic integration of mechanical, electrical, electronic and software technologies into electromechanical systems. Unfortunately, mechanical, electrical, and software data are often handled in separate Product Data Management (PDM) systems with no automated sharing of data between them or links between their data. Presently, this is a significant drawback with regard to supporting the collaborative and integrated design of mechatronic systems. One underlying research question to be addressed is: ''How can such domain-specific PDM systems be integrated and what are the standards needed for this?" Our starting point for addressing this question is to look into how engineering data is stored today. We believe that the more intelligent and sophisticated the mechanisms for file management are, the more Computer-aided Engineering systems will benefit from them in terms of making integrated cross-disciplinary product development more efficient. However, while Computer-Aided Design and Engineering (CAD/CAE) systems and related tools such as, for example, Product Data Management (PDM), Engineering Data Management (EDM), etc. have significantly matured over the past ten years, most of their associated database systems are still based on traditional file systems and hierarchical directory structures.In light of this context, we will initially discuss a number of disadvantages of current file management systems. In the body of the paper our main contribution is presented. That is, a formal mathematical model of a new semantic file system, SIL (Semantics Instead of Location), that allows engineers to access data based on semantic information rather than storage location is proposed. A major difference between our approach and previous related work is that we do not aim at yet another point solution and, instead, propose an approach that may be employed by next generation engineering data processing systems on a larger scale. In addition, a corresponding programming interface along with a graphical user interface used as a file browser is presented and the benefits of utilizing the proposed semantic file system for product data management in the field of integrated design of mechatronic systems are discussed.

The objective of the presented approach is to increase productivity of the design process by informing designers about the correlations to parallel work and by practising collaborative work. A cooperative design process is support by a shared design database called the Active Semantic Network (ASN). The ASN is an active, distributed, and object-oriented database system that supports the de nition of constraints that are evaluated by a rule-based approach. Constraints and locking con icts are used to nd out when the work of designers coincides and they have to adapt their work to results of colleagues. Additional to the support of information exchange, a cooperative transaction model provides several cooperation mechanisms to allow users to exchange partial results and share common data.

The benefits of Rapid Prototyping technologies can be applied efficiently only when they are embedded in an entire product development process. Rapid Product Development (RPD)-an iterative process involving manufacturing and evaluation of rapid prototypes-is mostly characterized by decentralized design teams cooperating on a high degree of process parallelism. In practice, RPD processes often lack mechanisms to combine design results of different designers, and, therefore, information management and the integration of interdisciplinary knowledge are some of the most central problems in the RPD process. An approach for supporting the entire RPD process consists of providing designers with a common knowledge base that represents all information relevant in RPD. Such a knowledge base helps to establish a common understanding and support the communication and cooperation of design teams. A requirement analysis of engineering databases shows that conventional database concepts do not support the required functionality of this application domain sufficiently. Here, advanced database features, such as an advanced transaction concept or active modelling primitives representing the semantics of product data, are needed. This paper presents a knowledge database called the Active Semantic Network. The Active Semantic Network has been developed to face the special tasks of designers working in RPD processes.

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Many modern products are complex systems comprised of highly integrated mechanical, electrical, electronic, and software components, which are commonly known as mechatronic systems. Similarly, product data and life-cycle management systems that support the engineering and design of mechatronic systems are becoming complex and need to store, retrieve, and process vast amounts of files associated with mechatronic products. For many years, software developers and computer architects have benefited by continuous increases in computational performance, as predicted by Moore's law. However, issues such as extreme power consumption have begun to limit certain types of performance increases such as hardware clock rates. In an effort to find new ways to increase computational performance, engineers and computer scientists have been investigating new techniques such as hardware acceleration systems, reconfigurable computing, and heterogeneous computing (HC). In light of these emerging computational paradigms, this paper introduces a semantic association hardware acceleration system for integrated product data management (PDM) based on semantic file systems. The concept of semantic path merger (SPM) is described along with a discussion of its realization as a hardware-based associative memory for accelerated semantic file retrieval. The energy and retrieval performance metrics of the proposed hardware system is given along with its comparative analysis with the industry standard content addressable memory (CAM). The goal of the proposed system is to enhance the state-of-art for the field of heterogeneous computing within the scope of computational platforms for design and engineering applications.