Development of a machine understandable language for design process representation

This paper describes the work in progress at Arizona State University to develop a design process description language. The intent is to go beyond decision making level in recording design activities, thus providing a basis for broad application of the proposed representation. At the same time the granularity is limited to a feasible level. The design language proposed in this paper currently is Prolog-based. It is able to relate the sequence of actions to attributes of the design artifacts, thus, providing reference to the product data. Specifics of the design process which are reflected in a natural way include iterations of the activities, versioning of the designs, as well as reasons, purpose, constraints, and method/knowledge/technique used for design decisions (although the latter is currently done in a somewhat unstructured manner). The association between rationale, actions, and artifacts is captured, so explanation of previous designs is adequately supported.