Capturing design dynamics - the CONCORD approach

`Computer-Supported Cooperative Work´ is a young research area considering applications with strong demands on database technology. Design applications need support for cooperation and some means for controlling their inherent dynamics. However, today´s CAD systems consisting of a collection of diverse design tools typically do not support these requirements. Therefore, an encompassing processing model is needed that covers the overall design process in general as well as CAD-tool application in particular. The CONCORD model described in the paper, reflects the distinct properties of design process dynamics by distinguishing three levels of abstraction. The highest level supports application-specific cooperation control and design process administration, the second considers goal-oriented tool invocation and work-flow management while the third level provides tool processing of design data. To achieve level-spanning control, the authors rely on transactional facilities provided at the various system layers