Decker, Louis P. | Engineering Papers

NASA NTRS1991

ISyCL technical report

The Air Force Integrated Information Systems Evolution Environment (IISEE) is a program focused on the development of technology for enabling the planning definition development and maintenance of evolutionary integrated information systems. This program has studied the representational needs of this knowledge base from the point of view of the needs of engineering, manufacturing, and logistics Evolutionary Information Systems (EIS). The definition of the concepts for a suite of automated tools and environments to support the pursuit of such engineering, manufacturing, and logistics EIS's has also required examination of languages and representation schemes for the knowledge base of these integrated systems. To accomplish this purpose, the language must be very rich, and must support object orientation, relational orientation, persistent storage, process transaction specification, and first order logic. The task of designing a unified language which supports these paradigms is a challenge. The Information Systems Constraint Language (ISyCL) is described. It was designed to meet the definitional and knowledge representation needs of three perspectives. It supports users from the area expert to the data base designer.

Decker, Louis P.↗

NASA NTRS1991

Analysis of methods

Information is one of an organization's most important assets. For this reason the development and maintenance of an integrated information system environment is one of the most important functions within a large organization. The Integrated Information Systems Evolution Environment (IISEE) project has as one of its primary goals a computerized solution to the difficulties involved in the development of integrated information systems. To develop such an environment a thorough understanding of the enterprise's information needs and requirements is of paramount importance. This document is the current release of the research performed by the Integrated Development Support Environment (IDSE) Research Team in support of the IISEE project. Research indicates that an integral part of any information system environment would be multiple modeling methods to support the management of the organization's information. Automated tool support for these methods is necessary to facilitate their use in an integrated environment. An integrated environment makes it necessary to maintain an integrated database which contains the different kinds of models developed under the various methodologies. In addition, to speed the process of development of models, a procedure or technique is needed to allow automatic translation from one methodology's representation to another while maintaining the integrity of both. The purpose for the analysis of the modeling methods included in this document is to examine these methods with the goal being to include them in an integrated development support environment. To accomplish this and to develop a method for allowing intra-methodology and inter-methodology model element reuse, a thorough understanding of multiple modeling methodologies is necessary. Currently the IDSE Research Team is investigating the family of Integrated Computer Aided Manufacturing (ICAM) DEFinition (IDEF) languages IDEF(0), IDEF(1), and IDEF(1x), as well as ENALIM, Entity Relationship, Data Flow Diagrams, and Structure Charts, for inclusion in an integrated development support environment.

Mayer, Richard J.↗