Object-oriented Design of an Intelligent Building Management System

The use of object technology is proliferating in the development of software, and in order to build robust and maintainable complex systems, mastering object-oriented (O-O) analysis and design is essential. Although the object-orientation area is converging towards standard modeling notations, namely UML, and standard middleware platforms, such as OMG’s CORBA, a large variety of O-O development methods are available for software engineers to design complex systems. The main goal of this paper is to report on the experience of applying a patternbased, object-oriented analysis and design methodology to a real-world complex system represented by an intelligent building. Specifically, the O-O GRASP approach has been used to design the software infrastructure, which handles the interactions among processing elements in a modern building. Benefits of the adoption of this O-O process, and issues and problems encountered, are discussed. We believe that this process communicate very fundamental principles of responsibility assignment in object-oriented design.