The conceptual-level design approach to complex systems

The increasing complexity and heterogeneity of current-day systems makes early design trade-offs and analysis a necessity. Typically such exploration is performed at a time that specifications are incomplete or ill-defined, and no behavioral or structural descriptions have been formulated. The only information available are properties of the system and its components, such as abstract functionality, complexity, constraints and cost functions. In present design practice, this level of abstraction, henceforth called the conceptual-level, is addressed in an ad-hoc fashion without much support from tools or without utilizing existing data and models. This paper proposes a methodology and framework to support conceptual-level design. It consists of a distributed data modeling environment combined with a set of appropriate user interfaces.