This award supports Ronald Giachetti, a graduate student of Professor Robert Young at North Carolina State University (NCSU), to spend six months carrying out research at the Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering of the Technical University of Aachen, Germany, where the expertise and facilities will greatly enhance his doctoral dissertation work. The goal of Mr. Young's research (and that of the participating U.S. and German research groups) is to design an approach to satisfy the huge information management requirements of concurrent engineering. In particular, he is focusing on an approach for uniting two different types of data management systems: the object-oriented database and the constraint-based processing system. The Technical University of Aachen is in the process of developing a large system to implement such an approach, building on the German research group's expertise in object-oriented databases and their application to the challenge of concurrent engineering. The research group at NCSU headed by Professor Paul Young has developed substantial expertise in constraint technology. Professor Young is currently spending a sabbatical visit working with the German group. This award will enable Mr. Giachetti, a very promising U.S. graduate student, to join him and gain valuable professional and international experience. Concurrent engineering involves the simultaneous consideration of the `life-cycle functions` of a product during the design phase. The goal is to improve the design, reduce the cost of the product and shorten the time to market. Each of these stages involves tremendous amounts of information and, often, different or even conflicting goals. Managing this enormous amount and variety of information is one of the main problems in implementing concurrent engineering. This proposal addresses these information requirements with an approach that combines state-of-the-art expertise from the U.S. and Germany.
