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The intelligent agent object (IAO) system is a multi‐paradigm development environment which can be used to create intelligent agent systems for manufacturing or other domains. The IAO system was developed from the rule‐based object (RBO) system which is a programming environment integrating both the rule‐based and object‐oriented paradigms. Propagation‐oriented programming, access‐oriented programming and group‐oriented programming are among the extensions included in the IAO system. Its most unusual contribution is the propagation‐oriented programming paradigm which is not found in most systems. A key application is the messenger inferencing structure which is a user‐extendable framework supporting multiple knowledge representation, meta‐inference control, and distributed inference. This allows the IAO system to go beyond predicate logic based production rule programming. New developments are also introduced for access‐oriented programming. The IAO system can be used to develop integrated manufacturing systems such as the prototype automated guided vehicle planning and control system, which is briefly described.

An application development framework for a software project based on fusion as an object‐oriented application development method is presented. An object‐oriented approach has been adopted for the design and implementation of the prototype interactive visual modelling system for building a visual presentation of a refinery process and creation of linear programming model for optimizing production decision variables. The main reason for this selection is the consideration of object‐oriented programming (OOP) as an obvious vehicle for the development of complex visual interactive modelling systems. The main dimensions of the framework are as follows: OO approach, fusion method, computer‐aided software engineering (CASE) tool, application development tool, GUI development tool, and C++ as an implementation language.

Presents the results of a study aimed at investigating the antecedent software development factors that affect quality of final products. By monitoring those causal factors from the early phases of development, one can have a final product of enhanced quality and reduced costs.

The study considered an unprecedentedly large number of 30 C++ object‐oriented systems of varied size and application domains, a comprehensive suite of large number of predictive software design or code measures in one study, and compared their results on a common platform.

It was found that many of the software design or code measures have a significant positive or negative relationship with quality.

The value of the paper lies in the fact that it addresses some of the major problems from which most of the studies conducted in this research domain suffer. The objective and justification of this paper are to address these deficiencies, in addition to validating some of the results obtained in earlier studies. Another important value of the paper lies in the fact that, based on the results of the study, the paper enlists useful lessons learned that can provide some practical insight for practitioners and quality managers.

Examines research work aimed at exploring and developing a new, object‐oriented system design and operation concept, and new system software and hardware design concepts which could be used to design and build an open, flexible and reconfigurable material handling system in a Computer Integrated Manufacturing [CIM] environment that could cope with changes imposed by the market on today’s manufacturing industries. Looks at the design of a reconfigurable and flexible conveyor system and outlines the benefits of using a 3‐D CIM reference model when developing CIM hardware and software control. Concludes that the proposed new conveyor system helps resolves the need for an assembly system which can achieve rapid and flexible responses to meet the challenge set by changing customer requirements.

The flexibility of an automated manufacturing system (AMS) is largely determined by the architecture of its supervisory software. The AMS supervisory software should be compatible enough to allow re‐configuration, maintenance, and upgrading to be done at a reasonable cost, so as to prolong the life span of the AMS, and to maintain its value and success. In this connection, the application of software engineering methodologies is to introduce better management of AMS software development, with a view to providing some structure and formality to express, analyse, and produce them. This paper presents an object‐oriented methodology to address the task of AMS supervisory software development. The effectiveness of the methodology is examined in an extensive case study of the development of the supervisory software for a flexible manufacturing cell (FMC) that contains a robot and an AGV.

This paper aims to propose a framework for building a flexible supply chain business model using an object‐oriented approach.

The proposed modeling framework has used the de facto object‐oriented modeling standard, Unified Modeling Language (UML), for building a supply chain model. To compensate for the potential weakness of the pure object‐oriented model and UML, the framework integrates business rules with its model.

This paper provides information about several sources, which are the bases of modeling a supply chain. The paper regards a supply chain as five view models with four business domains and each domain consists of functions, resources, processes, interactions and business rules.

A typical manufacturing supply chain is considered as a target system to apply this design methodology. The paper does not handle a real case study as an application example.

This paper newly added the category of “Business Process Reengineering (BPR)‐driven” models to the traditional taxonomy of supply chain models and proposed an object‐oriented business model (OOBM) for a supply chain as one of the BPR‐driven models. It is hoped that this modeling approach is highly usable and adds value to an analyst, practitioner, and designer in the field of supply chain.

Electronic commerce enables organizations to form virtual organizations. Shifting between different linkages of the partners for satisfying a need is the major characteristic of the virtual organization, and meta‐management beyond the individual organizational level must be applied in order to optimize the benefit for the entire organizational network. This paper proposes a meta‐management support system to support the meta‐management in virtual organizations. Object‐oriented organization modeling and virtual value chain analysis are used to implement the proposed meta‐management support system.

An effective system development paradigm and its associated design tools can streamline the production of flexible manufacturing systems. In view of the technological advances in developing complex manufacturing systems, a framework and its associated graphical development environment are presented in this paper. This framework aims at providing a unified platform to develop complex manufacturing systems with enhanced formality. Features include procedures for requirement analysis, simulation of system behavior, and formal verification of abstract implementation. The proposed framework helps to shorten lifecycle for system designs and helps engineers to produce manufacturing systems that conform better with original specifications with better quality. A flexible conveyor‐based production system is chosen as a case example to illustrate the capabilities of the proposed framework.

Ubiquitous web applications (UWA) are a new type of web applications which are accessed in various contexts, i.e. through different devices, by users with various interests, at anytime from anyplace around the globe. For such full‐fledged, complex software systems, a methodologically sound engineering approach in terms of model‐driven engineering (MDE) is crucial. Several modeling approaches have already been proposed that capture the ubiquitous nature of web applications, each of them having different origins, pursuing different goals and providing a pantheon of concepts. This paper aims to give an in‐depth comparison of seven modeling approaches supporting the development of UWAs.

This methodology is conducted by applying a detailed set of evaluation criteria and by demonstrating its applicability on basis of an exemplary tourism web application. In particular, five commonly found ubiquitous scenarios are investigated, thus providing initial insight into the modeling concepts of each approach as well as to facilitate their comparability.

The results gained indicate that many modeling approaches lack a proper MDE foundation in terms of meta‐models and tool support. The proposed modeling mechanisms for ubiquity are often limited, since they neither cover all relevant context factors in an explicit, self‐contained, and extensible way, nor allow for a wide spectrum of extensible adaptation operations. The provided modeling concepts frequently do not allow dealing with all different parts of a web application in terms of its content, hypertext, and presentation levels as well as their structural and behavioral features. Finally, current modeling approaches do not reflect the crosscutting nature of ubiquity but rather intermingle context and adaptation issues with the core parts of a web application, thus hampering maintainability and extensibility.

Different from other surveys in the area of modeling web applications, this paper specifically considers modeling concepts for their ubiquitous nature, together with an investigation of available support for MDD in a comprehensive way, using a well‐defined as well as fine‐grained catalogue of more than 30 evaluation criteria.

Object‐oriented programming, as an alternative to traditional, procedural programming methods for finite element analysis, is growing rapidly in importance as algorithms and programs become more complex. This paper reviews some of the literature and seeks to explain some of the concepts of object‐oriented thinking most useful to the finite element programmer, using as an example a C++ implementation of a heat transfer and solidification program.