Decision Support System for the Water Industry: An Object Oriented Approach

This report was produced for the Urban Water Research Association of Australia, a now discontinued research program.

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Report no. UWRAA 74

April 1994

Synopsis

This report outlines the development of MOSES, a Methodology for Object-oriented Software Engineering of Systems, which was initially developed in order to construct a decision support system to aid in a wastewater resources management and planning problem. The report also develops a design for the decision support system which provides a case-study evaluation of the methodology.

The research methodology essentially involved theory construction and case study evaluation. The research was undertaken in three parts. Part A was the identification of a problem in water resources planning leading to a proposed solution that involved the development of a decision support system and a number of process models of a wastewater treatment plant using an object-oriented approach. Part B was the development of an object-oriented analysis and design methodology, including the specification of the object-model supported, the notation and documentation supported, the life-cycle of an object-oriented development and the process of the methodology. Part C was an evaluation of the methodology and the construction of an object-oriented design for a decision support system for wastewater planning called ECWAT.

There are two major contributions of the research: a new object-oriented methodology; and the development of ECWAT. The results of the research into object-oriented methodologies includes a number of new features in the area of the object-model, the notation and the process. The object-model is an integration of semantic modelling and object-oriented programming language models; it uses the “software by contracting” metaphor for specifying behaviour; and it separates the inheritance and generalisation hierarchies during the design process. The notation is one of the most complete and consistent yet presented in the literature while the process is a detailed description of ten major activities necessary to construct an object-model. The research also presents a new object-oriented life-cycle model, called the fountain model.

Evaluation of the methodology concluded that it was strong as a technical methodology but was less comprehensive in the areas of management and design metrics which were identified as an important areas for further work.

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