text: Repeated experiments are performed to characterize the mechanism by which the material deforms. The dominant mechanism is the one which dominates the continuous deformation rate (strain rate), however at any given level of stress and temperature, more than one of the creep and plasticity mechanisms may be active.  The boundaries between the fields are determined from the constitutive equations of the deformation mechanisms by solving for stress as a function of temperature. Along these boundaries, the deformation rates for the two neighboring mechanisms are equal. The programming code used for many of the published maps is open source
  and an archive of its development is online. Many researchers have also written their own codes to make these maps.
  The main regions in a typical deformation mechanism map and their constitutive equations are shown in the following subsections.