CONCURRENT ENGINEERING WITH CONSTRAINT NETWORKS

Concurrent engineering is a systematic approach to the integrated, concurrent design of products and their related processes, including manufacture and support. It allows the consideration of all elements of the product's life cycle, from conception through disposal, including quality, cost, manufacturing, and customer requirements. Constraint networks as an approach to concurrent engineering provides considerable advantages over the conventional approaches to improve engineering. Constraint networks are difficult to implement though and function best when applied to a small design team concerned with designing within a family ofrelated products or processes.