ModelObjects--a model management component for the development of planning support systems

Traditional approaches of building spatial decision support systems based on a GIS environment have not fully addressed the issues of model sharing and reusing among different application systems. This paper aims to design a ModelObjects, an object-oriented model management component, that can be incorporated into an urban planning support system (PSS) to manage analytical models and to help users to build new models by reusing existing model resources in the system. The architecture of ModelObjects component and its essential functions are defined. Procedures for model generalization, representation and decomposition are developed according to object-oriented concepts and methods. These procedures can be adopted to decompose urban planning models into a set of model components and elements, and these model components can be used as the `building blocks' of the model library. Finally, we examine how ModelObjects and its associated procedures and techniques are implemented in a prototype PSS to facilitate the construction, retrieval and execution of analytical models in the planning process.