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RASSP Information Management Appnote

1.0 Introduction

Two critical aspects of information management within a computer-aided design environment are the configuration management and authorization management of the design data. Configuration Management (CM) is the management of the versioning of design objects. It includes creating, approving and releasing a new version of a design object; organizing the versions of a design object; and assembling compatible configurations of versions of design objects to form a release of a product. Authorization Management (AM) is the management of the granting and revoking of access to the design objects for the various users of the system. It involves specifying the types of operations that may be performed on data objects, partitioning the design object space at the appropriate granularity for specifying access controls, and partitioning the users of the system into the various roles for specifying access privileges. Different CAD vendor tools provide different mechanisms to support configuration management and authorization management. A mechanism is an individual function of a system. The mechanisms provided by the tools not only vary in scope, but also in their semantics. In an integrated product development environment (IPDE) which involves several vendor tools, such as RASSP, diverse and incompatible configuration management mechanisms and authorization management mechanisms across tools can lead to the inefficiencies in the design process listed below:

There is no common way of handling the CM and AM of a product throughout its life cycle
The design engineers working on a project have to learn several different paradigms for CM and AM
The CM data on a product generated by one tool cannot be used by another tool
The authorization information cannot be shared among the various tools used in the CAD environment. Authorizations have to be specified separately in the various tools and the management of the consistency of the authorization information among the tools is cumbersome.

We describe in this document a common model of configuration management and authorization management that may be adopted by an integrated product development environment. We have specified a common minimal set of mechanisms that need to be provided by the tools to support the proposed configuration and authorization models. An important criterion we CM and AM models have been implemented as part of the design environment developed for the Rapid Prototyping of Application-Specific Signal Processors (RASSP) program.

The Rapid Prototyping of Application-Specific Signal Processors (RASSP) is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)/Tri-Service program aimed at dramatically improving the process of design, manufacture, test and procurement of digital signal processors. The RASSP program will deliver an integrated system called the RASSP system, which integrates the CAD tools used in the RASSP design process under a framework referred to as the enterprise framework. An enterprise framework provides the facilities and services necessary to integrate the automated processes of an enterprise. In the RASSP system the enterprise framework provides support for workflow management, design data management and reuse data management. The workflow management subsystem of the RASSP enterprise system enables a RASSP system administrator to model and enforce a particular design methodology for a project. The data management subsystem of the enterprise framework provides facilities for configuration managing, and controlling access to design data files that may reside at various sites in a computer network. The reuse data management subsystem provides facilities for cataloging, classifying and storing reusable design components; as well as mechanisms for searching for reusable components.

In the next section we present the RASSP CM model, and in section 3 we present the RASSP AM model. In section 4 we present a pilot implementation of the models, and the lessons learned from the implementation. The application of the CM and AM tools in a real world design project is the subject of section 5. In section 6 we compare the RASSP CM and AM facilities with an out-of-the-box product data management system.

Next: 2 The RASSP Configuration Management Model Up: Appnotes Index Previous:Appnote INFO Index

Approved for Public Release; Distribution Unlimited Dennis Basara