TITLE: An Introduction to the ASCEND Modeling System: Its Language and 
Interactive Environment
AUTHORS: Piela, P., McKelvey, R., and Westerberg, A.
PUBLICATION: Journal of Management Information Systems ,Vol. 9, No.3, 
91-121 (An earlier version of this paper was published in the 
Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Hawaii International Conference on System 
Sciences, IEEE Computer Society Press, 1992)
PUBLISHER: M. E. Sharpe, Inc.
DATE: 1993
ABSTRACT: Recently there has been a growing realization among 
researchers and practitioners that current technologies do not adequately 
support mathematical modeling "in the large." In this paper we discuss a 
technology called ASCEND (Advanced System for Computations in 
ENgineering Design) , which addresses this issue. We describe two aspects 
of the technology: a modeling language and an interactive model-building 
environment. The ASCEND language is structured, declarative, and strongly 
typed, and incorporates object-oriented extensions. The interactive 
environment is based on the notion of a concurrent set of tools that reflect 
the various phases of ASCEND modeling. These tools do not enforce a 
strict sequence of operations, but rather have been designed to support the 
flexible access implied by declaratively specified models. We claim that 
ASCEND offers solutions to several of the issues raised by Arthur Geoffrion 
in his article, "Computer-based modeling environments," (Geoffrion, 1989) 
and use categories introduced by him to frame this discussion.