The use of Expert-EASE's 'EASE+' package to develop user-interfaces for mathematical modelling and simulation

The Intelligent Simulation group within Sheffield University's Control Engineering department is involved in the production of mathematical modelling software to simulate physical systems. Specifically the group has developed a suite of PC-based programs called KEMS (knowledge-based environment for modelling and simulation). KEMS encompasses a wide range of different tasks within a single application and different parts of the system are coded in different languages. Because of this, and the complexity of the application itself, the quality of the user-interface is particularly important. It was therefore decided to construct the user-interface using a specialised front-end builder. The package chosen eventually for this task was Expert-EASE Systems' EASE+. EASE stands for engineering applications software environment, and it is essentially a flexible graphics database management system which contains an interface development toolbox. EASE+ can be mounted on either PCs or workstations, and as well as being a development tool, it is capable of producing runtime software modules.<
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