9224783 Hardwick This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. This project is designing and building a prototype archive and version control system that facilitates concurrent engineering by allowing engineers to coordinate concurrent changes to a design. The system permits engineers to merge concurrent changes, find conflicts between concurrent changes, ask questions about the contents of changes and designs, and resolve conflicts between design versions produced by concurrent changes. The system models the contents of a design using the EXPRESS language of the STEP standard for the exchange of engineering product data. The EXPRESS schemas are managed by the archive and version control system in addition to the design versions themselves so that the various tools of the system have access to both the data and its schemas. The system will significantly advance the data management infrastructure for concurrent engineering and manufacturing by supporting collaborations between engineers as they concurrently work on the design of products. ***
