8.4. IDEF1X

In the 1970s, the U.S. Air Force began work on a program for Integrated Computer Aided Manufacturing (ICAM). This was the genesis of a family of IDEF modeling languages. The acronym “IDEF” originally denoted “ICAM DEFinition”, but now stands for “Integration DEFinition”, reflecting its possible use for exchanging information between different modeling languages. Rather than specifying one universal modeling language, the ICAM project defined the following languages for different tasks:

  • IDEF0 activity modeling

  • IDEF1 conceptual data modeling

  • IDEF2 simulation modeling

Later, other languages were added, including:

  • IDEFIX logical data modeling

  • IDEF3 process modeling

  • IDEF4 object-oriented software design

  • IDEF5 knowledge engineering of enterprise ...

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