From concepts to consistent object specifications: Translation of a domain-oriented feature framework into practice

A steady increase in consumer demands, and severe constraints from both a somewhat damaged environment and newly installed government policies, require today's product design and development to be faster and more efficient than ever before, yet utilizing even fewer resources. New holistic approaches, such as total product life cycle modeling which embraces all aspects of a product's life cycle, are current attempts to solve these problems. Within the field of product design and modeling, feature technology has proved to be one very promising solution component. Owing to the tremendous increase in information technology, to transfer from low level data processing towards knowledge modeling and information processing is about to bring a change in almost every computerized application. From this viewpoint, current problems of both feature frameworks and feature systems are analyzed in respect to static and dynamic consistency breakdowns. The analysis ranges from early stages of designing (feature) concepts to final system implementation and application. Por the first time, an integrated view is given oil approaches, solutions and practical experience, with feature concepts and structures, providing both a feature framework and its implementation with sufficient system architecture and computational power to master a fair number of known consistency breakdowns, while providing for robust contexts for feature semantics and integrated models. Within today's heavy use of information technology these are pre-requisites if the full potential of feature technology is to be successfully translated into practice.