A Monitor for Complex CAD Systems

The complexity and number of CAD tools is increasing day by day. As a consequence the designer is faced with the problem of selecting the appropriate sequence of operations and of keeping in mind the current status of the design. This paper describes a flexible supervisor, called Monitor, based on an extended Petri Net model, that handles the interactions among a user definable set of tools. The designer, using this interface to the CAD system, has at his fingertips the updated situation of each subpart of the project that he is developing. A high degree of priority has been given to the friendliness and naturality of this supervisor: the user can really start using it without any training and manuals seem to be superflous.