MIDA - AN OPEN SYSTEMS ARCHITECTURE FOR MODEL-ORIENTED INTEGRATION OFDATA AND ALGORITHMS

MIDA defines an architecture for building distributed Decision Support Systems by integrating high-level modeling approaches and implementat ion techniques for platform independent distributed client/server appl ications. One of the chief design goals is hiding of all infrastructur al and system specific implementation details to users. MIDA covers so lutions for model-oriented representation, administration, and (remote ) access to both data and methods in distributed heterogeneous compute r and networking environments. AMBAS-SOOM is an implemented variant of the MIDA architecture which has been developed at FAW. AMBAS-SOOM has two main components: the distributed operating platform AMBAS and the modeling environment SOOM, which implements concepts of Structured Mo deling (SM) and Object Orientation. Models are developed using the gra phical expert interface of SOOM and include formal descriptions of dat a types, of methods (functions, solvers) and relationships between dat a and methods. These models are translated automatically into executab les for AMBAS. AMBAS contains an Object Request Broker mechanism to as sign requests for data or methods from applications to services availa ble within the network and, therefore, enables reuse of distributed da ta and methods to build up new models. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.