V-CMS: a visual computational modeling system
Yongmao Chen · 1996
In this dissertation, we propose a new visual environment for a computational modeling system, called V-CMS, which is motivated by the requirements and applications in NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS). V-CMS supports application modeling design and analysis for scientists and engineers. Our system's graphical user interface includes six components: an application project window which supports project management; a model window which supports model manipulation and browsing; a data domain window which supports browsing in hierarchical data structures and data manipulation in three levels (abstract, concrete and instances); a flowchart editor in which users can define and execute models by data flow diagram; function library which shows the hierarchical structure of functions and allows users to access function library; and a message display window with an on-line help function. In this research, we not only supply a visual language using flowchart representation, but also give the user a strong software development environment making it very easy for the user to deal with very complex modeling problems. We propose a new method, called top-down flowchart construction, to divide a large model into smaller sub-models, which supports scientists and engineers in handling large modeling applications. The flowchart editor also supports the bottom-up method, which we have combined in our top-down method. We present a way to communicate with the underlying system which has universality for many GUI designs. We have shown that good representations for complex entities help in the efficient implementations of various procedures.