To describe a design task involving a set of different CAD tools, tool integrator must write different tool invocation procedures, tool and data dependencies, and preconditions and postconditions for executing tools. For simplifying the complex proced...
To describe a design task involving a set of different CAD tools, tool integrator must write different tool invocation procedures, tool and data dependencies, and preconditions and postconditions for executing tools. For simplifying the complex procedures of integrating tools, this paper presents a new object-oriented method to implement the concept of abstracting the invocation of tools. The abstraction of tool invocation provides a mechanism to hide the complexity of flow dependencies among different tools. We define control information about tools as tool object, and then tool invocation program unique to a given tool is model as tool method. This approach can support open tool integration and message-based programming for describing design tasks.