Constraint-based support for negotiation in collaborative design

When constraints are used to represent engineering requirements, enhanced support for collaboration becomes possible. More specifically, if important engineering;design specifications are represented as groups of inequalities on continuous variables, solving these constraints results in spaces of feasible values. Such spaces improve efficiency through avoiding artificial conflicts, improving design flexibility, enhancing change management and assisting conflict resolution. This paper describes an implementation that employs algebraic reformulation, which includes an efficient approach for transformation to ternary expressions. This approach reduces limitations related to computational complexity that were inherent in previous implementations. Important features are then illustrated using a full-scale example. Carrying out collaborative design using solution spaces (CDSS) with this new implementation called SpaceSolver. Such software is expected to enhance future collaboration tools. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.