TABLE OF CONTENTS "I am myself a great lover of these processes of division and generalization; they help me to speak and to think."
Plato, in Phaedrus
The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the model space, which is where most of the action takes place in MOSES, and which defines the variables and dimensions that are addressed in succeeding chapters of this book. The chapter is laid out in the form of a traditional engineering sequence: scope, context, requirements, design, and implementation.
This chapter introduces a general concept of a model space, along with the scope and context of the SE model space and a statement of the resulting requirements of a model space.
A preliminary answer to this question is that a model space is a futuristic model-oriented combination of two traditional concepts: (1) a domain body of knowledge (BoK) and (2) a collection of project libraries or project databases. We call these, respectively, a knowledge space and workspaces. [1] The concept of BoK is discussed in some detail in Chapter 7 but for now we will explain both the knowledge space and the workspace by means of an example. Traditional engineering handbooks provide examples of guides to mature BoKs. Two examples are Perry's Chemical Engineers' Handbook (Green and Perry 2007) and Marks' Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers (Avallone, Baumeister, and Sadegh 2007). Engineering handbooks contain a very large number of models. Some of the models are...
