A Framework to Build Financial Models
Description
I've been working on a fairly large financial modeling project with
Caterpillar. Our main result (from the point of
view of Object-Oriented Solutions) is a framework for financial modeling.
It lets you quickly build applications that examine financial data
stored in a relational database and produces profit and loss statements,
balance sheets, detailed analysis of departments, sales regions, and
business lines, with the ability to drill down until you hit individual
transactions. It lets you budget and correct errors in the data, too.
We are hoping that once the relational databases are built (which takes
a long time in Caterpillar because most of their data has to be taken
from other sources, and every business unit is different and so has to
define its own data model) that it will only take a week or two to
build the rest of the system. We expect to be able to define a complete
system for any business unit without any Smalltalk programming. The
business model is stored in the database, not written in Smalltalk, and
we have written a GUI for building it. The menus, reports, drill-downs,
etc are also stored in the database.
This is the beginning of documentation for the Financial Model
developed during my
PhD work in the
Department of Computer Science at the
University of Illinois.
This project was funded by Caterpillar
at the
National Computational Science Alliance (formerly National Center for Supercomputing Applications).
The Financial Model is a set of frameworks
for creating financial models. This system was developed using ParcPlace
Smalltalk. The current system is based upon release 2.5.1 from
ParcPlace. The development environment consists of using various
support tools.
Basically, we are working on a model for developing financial models
and providing visual tools and languages for generating these
without knowing very much Smalltalk. This work followed closely the set of patterns described in the
Evolving Frameworks paper by Don Roberts and Ralph Johnson.
Very detailed documentation has also been written on this (50+ pages) and
a PDF format can be found here. There has been
some patterns, presentations, and other relevant papers describing some design and
details of the financial modeling framework.
Frameworks Developed
The following is a list of the frameworks developed for the
financial modeling tool.
Class comments have also been directly exported from the current development image.
Smalltalk Code
Some of the code will soon be available here.
These were accepted and reviewed at previous
PLoP
Conferences.
The following is a list of some of the presentations given about the
financial modeling framework.
Here is a list of Joe's relevant research links.
And, here is Joe's framework page. |
