Use graph grammars to design CAD-systems !

Abstract

Graph grammars, especially when enriched with attributes, can be used as a powerful software engineering technique. The main idea behind this approach is: A problem domain is modelled by a graph, the representation graph, whose nodes correspond to the objects of the domain and whose edges to the relations between the objects, respectively. Typical operations which normally change the structure of the representation graph, like introducing new objects at a certain state of the problem description, or modifying relations between objects, are expressed by graph productions. Quantitative informations are handled by the attributes attached to the nodes of the representation graph. So, the implementation aspects are reduced to a very general and flexible data structure, namely graphs.