Project No.: 5003-045354 01.04.96 - 31.12.99

Project leader: Prof. Klaus Dittrich, Institut für Informatik, University of Zurich
e-mail: dittrich@ifi.unizh.ch

Name of project: IDEE: Integration of Data in Engineering Environments

Partners: Johann Obermaier, ABB Corporate Research Center, Baden-Dättwil

Funding: Sfr 611,454.-

Summary:
The development, production and maintenance of complex engineering products today is supported by a whole range of heterogeneous IT tools, each of which has its own data management system. As it is not possible in complex cases to replace these tools by an integrated environment, it is essential to improve the integration of different types of data management system. This prevents errors resulting from the manual input of new data, ensures the consistency of data over several tools and provides a comprehensive view of project-specific data.

This project, "IDEE - Integration of Data in Engineering Environments", creates an overall framework for the integration of data from different tools. It must be borne in mind that each design draft is presented in a variety of successive versions. The integrated tool (a tightly coupled database federation) offers comprehensive views on different levels of abstraction and a powerful inquiry functionality.

Project phase one achieved the following results:

• Comparison of different data models
• Selection and definition of a tightly coupled integration and an adapted architectural scheme
• Presentation of the proposed architecture at international scientific conferences
• Definition of an application scenario and an initial demonstrator version.

The goals of the continuation phase are:

• to introduce the concept of element versioning
• to check the integrity and propagation of updates
• to design an object-oriented framework
• to prepare for the use of IDEE in the real world.

Cooperation: This is an integrated project by Zurich University’s database technology unit and the ABB Corporate Research Center in Baden-Dättwil in a format of cooperation dating back to the SPP IF programme. In the present case, the developed overall framework is applied as a prototype project in the gas turbines area.

The work done by Zurich University will comprise conceptional solutions and the generic part of the solution to the problem, while the industrial partner develops the concrete solutions. Close cooperation is designed to ensure a practice-oriented procedure.