Mathemtical Model of Composite Objects and Its Application for Organizing Engineering Databases

  • Authors:

  • M. A. Ketabchi;V. Berzins

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 1988

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Abstract

The authors introduce a clustering concept called component aggregation which considers assemblies having the same types of parts as equivalent objects. The notion of equivalent objects is used to develop a mathematical model of composite objects. It is shown that the set of equivalence classes of objects form a Boolean algebra whose minterms represent the objects that are not considered composite at the current viewing level. The algebraic structure of composite objects serves as a basis for developing a technique for organizing composite objects and supporting materialization of explosion views. The technique provides a clustering mechanism which partitions the database into meaningful and application-oriented clusters, and allows any desired explosion view to be materialized using a minimal set of stored views. A simplified relational database for design data and a set of frequent access patterns in design applications are outlined and used to demonstrate the benefits of database organizations based on the mathematical model of composite objects.