| In a facility engineering process, large amounts of data must be communicated between different participants and computer applications across various life-cycle phases. Effective communication of this data is vital to maintaining work productivity, minimizing costs, and ensuring high engineering quality. However, communicating this data is often difficult because users (i.e., participants or applications) have different needs for the facility data and thus use different data representations. Data in different representations cannot be communicated directly between these users. Research in data integration focuses on improving the compatibility of data and data representations within the same process. Data modeling is an important issue in such research.;This dissertation reports on research in modeling data in facility engineering for the purpose of supporting data integration. The research described here involves the development of a methodology, the Primitive-Composite (or P-C) Approach, for analyzing a given facility engineering domain and for designing a common object-oriented schema for that domain (or "domain primitive schema"). This approach includes four phases: (1) Preliminary Domain Study, (2) Functional Analysis, (3) Domain Entities Analysis and (4) Domain Schema Design. In addition, this approach incorporates the requirements and criteria for designing the schema and offers the modeling tools used in the phases, leading to the development of a schema meeting the requirements. These modeling tools also provide the elements (i.e., concepts, graphical representations, operations, rules, etc.) necessary for building Computer-Aided Software Engineering tools with which a designer can model facility data using the P-C Approach. The resulting primitive schema can be shared among multiple users and across life-cycle phases within the domain. Specifically, the primitive schema can support customization of multiple user views and can be extended to accommodate evolving life-cycle phases. Further, this schema is rich in content, representing form, function, and behavior of the design objects in the domain. The P-C Approach was applied to the domain of electrical transmission towers. It was also tested in this domain. A database of a selected tower was implemented using a commercial object-oriented database management system. |
