An activity-object world view for ABCmod conceptual models

Abstract

In spite of its considerable intuitive appeal, an activity oriented perspective for model development has largely been ignored in the modeling and simulation community. Recently, however, the naturalness of the activity perspective provided the basis for the development, by the authors, of a comprehensive, flexible but descriptive conceptual modeling environment; namely, the ABCmod framework (ABCmod = Activity Based Conceptual modeling) [1, 2, 4]. A new world view called the Activity-Object World View has emerged from this previous work which facilitates the transformation of an ABCmod conceptual model into a simulation model. The key feature of this world view is that the activity is treated as an object in an object-oriented (OO) programming paradigm. The ABSmod/J package (ABSmod = Activity Based Simulation Modeling with Java) has been developed to create simulation models based on this world view and its features are outlined in this paper. Unlike traditional world views, the approach does not extract, and separately manage, the underlying events but rather retains their existence as integral parts of activity objects.