IDEF3 - History

History

The original IDEFs were developed since the mid-1970s for the purpose of enhancing communication among people who needed to decide how their existing systems were to be integrated. IDEF0 was designed to allow a graceful expansion of the description of a systems' functions through the process of function decomposition and categorization of the relations between functions (i.e., in terms of the Input, Output, Control, and Mechanism classification). IDEF1 was designed to allow the description of the information that an organization deems important to manage in order to accomplish its objectives.

The third IDEF (IDEF2) was originally intended as a user interface modeling method. However, since the Integrated Computer-Aided Manufacturing (ICAM) Program needed a simulation modeling tool, the resulting IDEF2 was a method for representing the time varying behavior of resources in a manufacturing system, providing a framework for specification of math model based simulations. It was the intent of the methodology program within ICAM to rectify this situation but limitation of funding did not allow this to happen. As a result, the lack of a method which would support the structuring of descriptions of the user view of a system has been a major shortcoming of the IDEF system. The basic problem from a methodology point of view is the need to distinguish between a description of what a system (existing or proposed) is supposed to do and a representative simulation model that will predict what a system will do. The latter was the focus of IDEF2, the former is the focus of IDEF3.