An object-oriented approach to structured modeling

Structured modeling is one of the most important modeling paradigms in the field of decision support systems. It has high generality and shares features to some extent with object-oriented modeling in software engineering. On the other hand, compared with object-oriented modeling paradigms, structured modeling also has some shortcomings. In this paper, we first examine structured modeling from the point view of object-oriented modeling, and show that structured modeling lacks the expressive power to capture the dynamic aspect of systems. Then we propose a framework for structured modeling which aims to model the dynamic aspect of systems. Among others, one of the advantages of this framework is that the resultant dynamic models have some kind of normal form. And the normal form of models will provide a solid foundation For model integration. Example is given to illustrate our framework, and the potential application of this framework is also discussed.