| As the 21st century nears, the challenges for information acquisition, management, and dissemination continue to grow. In this age of information, large volumes of complex, highly interdependent data must be managed by crucial software applications for areas such as healthcare, telecommunications, manufacturing, banking, etc. These critical applications must be able to utilize information in a timely and efficient fashion, and have the ability to support and promote collaboration. An application is required to be able to collect, synthesize, and analyze information. The adequate protection of information is another important requirement.;Given the stringent requirements placed on software applications, an engineering approach must be taken during their design to ensure that qualities such as correctness, robustness, maintainability, verifiability, etc. are met. Current software engineering practices have several drawbacks, including: the lack of uniformity among the different tools and techniques; and, the absence of a systematic, engineering approach in many of the current tools. The primary goal of this work is to expand the capabilities of the object-oriented paradigm to support a more comprehensive design experience while maintaining information consistency, yielding a design model and accompanying environment with engineering rigor. Towards this end, this dissertation presents: an organized approach to specification construction; a high-level application design technique; a well-defined formal object-oriented design model; and a corresponding design environment. A methodology is also proposed for the construction of the application, to induce a more precise application specification, design, and development process.;The proposed design environment incorporates an engineering approach which offers: many different modeling choices for design development; supports dynamic, designer-defined choices; and, ensures information consistency through automatic and on-demand design analyses. These design analyses embody engineering rigor and structure that alert the designer to potential design flaws and inconsistencies, and support the detailed evaluation of a design. The usage and access of the application is considered as an integral aspect of the design, therefore the environment also supports the specification of security requirements, which are crucial to insure controlled access. Finally, the environment serves as a prototype to verify and empirically test the concepts and ideas of this research effort. |
