From Concepts to Consistent Object Specifications:Translation of a Domain-Oriented Feature Framework into Practice

A steady increase in consumer demands, and severe constraintsfrom both a somewhat damaged environment and newly installed governmentpolicies, require today's product design and development to be fasterand more efficient than ever before, yet utilizing even fewerresources. New holistic approaches, such as total product life cyclemodeling which embraces all aspects of a product's life cycle, arecurrent attempts to solve these problems. Within the field of productdesign and modeling, feature technology has proved to be one verypromising solution component. Owing to the tremendous increase ininformation technology, to transfer from low level data processing towardsknowledge modeling and information processing is about to bring achange in almost every computerized application. From this viewpoint,current problems of both feature frameworks and feature systems areanalyzed in respect to static and dynamic consistency breakdowns. Theanalysis ranges from early stages of designing (feature) concepts tofinal system implementation and application. For the first time, anintegrated view is given on approaches, solutions and practicalexperience, with feature concepts and structures, providing both afeature framework and its implementation with sufficient systemarchitecture and computational power to master a fair number of knownconsistency breakdowns, while providing for robust contexts for featuresemantics and integrated models. Within today's heavy use ofinformation technology these are pre-requisites if the full potentialof feature technology is to be successfully translated into practice.