A functional programming environment for CACSD and data management

An engineering design environment should allow users to design complex engineering systems, to manage and coordinate the designs as they proceed, and to develop and modify the software tools used for designs. These requirements call for a programming environment with an integrated set of software tools of different functionalities. The required functionalities are mainly: the provision of design algorithms based on suitable numeric software, appropriate data structures for the application area, the provision of a design database for the long term management of the designs generated and a user-friendly interface. The provision of such an integrated design environment in a functional programming language environment with particular emphasis on the provision of appropriate control-theoretic data structures and a semantic database is described. A functional data model forms the basis of the database model. Structural properties, and relationships are modelled as functions mapping entities to values or other entities. Entities are classified entity types with inheritance semantics