Patent ID: 6859201

Claim:
In a computer aided design environment, a method comprising: receiving a selection of a first subpart of a mechanical design; providing a display of a dependent graph of said mechanical design, the dependent graph including a plurality of nodes and one or more arcs linking the plurality of nodes, where a node corresponds to an atomic design variable, an atomic design variable representing a lowest level information building block to the mechanical design, and an arc linking two nodes represents a dependency between the atomic design variables represented by the linked nodes; and highlighting, in response to the selection of the first subpart, a first plurality of graphical elements of the dependent graph of said mechanical design, wherein said highlighted first plurality of graphical elements comprises a first plurality of nodes associated with the selected first subpart of the mechanical design and a first one or more arcs linking said first plurality of nodes where said first plurality of nodes correspondingly represents a first plurality of atomic design variables of said first subpart.