A HYPERTEXT SOFTWARE PACKAGE TO HELP DOCUMENT SYSTEM DESIGNS

A hypertext-based software package was created to help engineers, with little formal systems engineering experience, to document a system de sign. A hypertext-based object-oriented programming environment was us ed to allow easy transfer of information within the design and to prov ide a user friendly interface. Tradeoff analysis was automated. This a llowed fast sensitivity analysis within the tradeoff studies and great ly decreased the time needed to complete the concept exploration. Grad uate students extensively tested the software. Ease in writing the doc umentation and completing the analysis was a major benefit. Drawbacks were the software's slow speed and its inability to automatically reen ter extracted data.