TracED: A tool for capturing and tracing engineering design processes

Abstract

The design of products or production processes in many engineering disciplines such as chemical, or software engineering, involves many creative and sometimes unstructured activities, with an opportunistic control flow. During these design processes, several models are generated, which have different levels of abstraction of the object being designed. Given the difficulties in dealing with this complexity using an improvised way, there is an urgent need for tools that support the capture and tracing of this process. In this proposal, TracED, a computational environment to support the capture and tracing of engineering design process is presented. It allows defining a particular engineering design domain and supporting the capture of how products under development are transformed along an engineering design process. Particularly, in this work, we consider software architectures design domain. As in any complex process, the support of computational tools is required for enabling its capture.