Tools for consistency management between design products

Consistency between different design documents is most important, as these documents are usually elaborated by different persons. Consistency means that structures within different documents “match” each other and also the values of corresponding attributes. Interactive and incremental tools for building up and maintaining consistency – so-called integrators – install fine-grained relations (semantic links) between objects of these documents. Such integrators have been investigated for some time in different application domains (Nagl, 1996).This paper deals with two extensions of integrators (Körtgen, 2009a and Körtgen, 2009b). Both are devoted to speed up the (re-)integration process. The first extension makes use of the still valuable information of links damaged due to changes of documents. The second reuses consistent documents of past projects, to find out big and suitable related parts of design documents or of corresponding underlying knowledge. This paper is written for a chemical engineer and, therefore, emphasizes the tool functionality side.