"Field Manager" Application Package

One of the important problems in the development of Decision Support Systems regards the issue of designing and implementation of man-machine interface. Importance of this component of the DSS follows from the fact that the end-user is usually not a computer specialist and, therefore, even the most useful decision-theoretic framework will be rejected if communication with the computer is too difficult for him. From the other side, design and implementation of user interface requires a lot of experience from the system designer, big resources for programming and a long time for for debugging and coding. Therefore, every attempt to simplify this aspect of DSS design and development is important. In this paper the software package Field Manager is presented. This package allows easy and quick development of user interfaces. The design is based on two novel ideas in the field of software management -- the abstract data type approach and object-oriented software specification. The package has been applied in several practical applications and the collected experience has shown its effectiveness and simplicity

Integration Principles in Numerical Software

Since personal computers are currently being used by individuals who are not professional computer specialists, the need for a framework allowing quick and easy development of user-friendly software is necessary. One such framework is the concept of software integration. This concept is now reasonably popular and several software tools allowing for such integration are available on the market. Unfortunately, all of these tools are oriented towards office automation systems, word processing, telecommunications etc. No such tools are available for scientific users which would allow easy utilization of mathematical programming software, model building and analysis etc. This paper presents the system DISO which can support dialogue solving mathematical programming problems. The system allows for the treatment of all mathematical programming modules in a uniform way, allowing easy interaction with the user utilizing various metaphors for data presentation and analysis of results as well as being open -- i.e. new mathematical programming modules can be easily linked to the system. The DISO system has been designed utilizing modern software engineering concepts, like hierarchical program structuring, object-oriented paradigm and abstract data types oriented interface