Patent ID: 8798975

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for designing a mechanical assembly of a plurality of physical objects, the method comprising: by one or more processors: providing a directed acyclic modeling graph having nodes and arcs, the directed acyclic model graph capturing design characteristics of a mechanical assembly, the mechanical assembly being formed of a plurality of physical objects, the directed acyclic modeling graph representing a hierarchy between physical objects of the mechanical assembly, each physical object being a part of a set of parts of the mechanical assembly, the directed acyclic modeling graph serving as a model representation of mechanical links and relative positionings of different parts of the mechanical assembly; for each node, using the node to represent a respective physical object of the mechanical assembly; for each arc, using the arc to represent a use of a use of a physical object by another physical object in the mechanical assembly, for a given arc, the given arc representing a respective physical object represented by an origin node using a respective physical object represented by an end node, wherein a chain of identifiers corresponds to a path of arcs, at least one arc being uniquely identified by an identifier; further modeling the mechanical assembly using tuples in the graph, by representing at least one design relation of the physical objects using a tuple containing a first chain of identifiers corresponding to a path of arcs between nodes representing a first physical object and a second physical object, said tuple representing a use sequence of the physical objects where the first physical object uses the second physical object in the mechanical assembly; determining at least one mapping between the first chain and a second chain of identifiers, the second chain having an identifier in common with the first chain; and substituting at least one occurrence of the first chain with the second chain in the tuple used by the at least one design relation, said determining and substituting automatically reflecting an update of the design characteristics of the mechanical assembly.