One of the biggest challenges in modern engineering companies is the management of electronic data produced and used by various computer applications during product development and manufacturing. Applications include CAD, FEA, CAM, CATS, CAPP and so on. These programs come from different vendors; they produce and use data in many different formats. Not all the data from one program is relevant to another. Changes made to one model affect many other models, so we need to understand the constraints and relations. In the past 20+ years CAD companies have developed Product Data Management (PDM) systems to manage CAD, FEA and CAM data. But these PDM systems are just glorified file managers and "data management" is done at a superficial level. In recent years, PDM has given way to PLM (Product Life Cycle Management) which handles a wider range of applications and data types.

There are also new applications emerging that are knowledge based. There is desire to not only capture the outcome of design but also the process and the rationale.

Important research issues in Engineering Informatics include: Data & Information models for particular domains, Ontologies development, data exchange standards, knowledge representation structures, constraint modeling, and other such issues.

Current Projects

• OAM+ Object oriented assembly model
• Nrep+ Free form feature representation language
• STEP AP203 to AP224 translator

• Synergetic Design Systems, 1992
• Design Process Representation, 1993
• Interoperability in heterogeneous design environment, 1994
• The Shared Design Manager, 1995
• Integrated Product & Process Model for Electro-mechanical Design, 1996
• Consolidated Data Schema using STEP for Airframe Design, 1997
• Design History Capture & retrieval, 1998
• Derivation of a standard set of geometric constraints for parametric modeling and data exchange, 2000
• Geometric Exemplar for design knowledge representation, 2001
• Exemplar networks for design automation and case based reasoning, 2003