Industrial systems have long ago passed the level where they could be controlled by unaided humans. The development of human factors engineering has reflected the technological development, particularly as it is represented in the transition from manual tasks through supervisory tasks to planning tasks. In this paper the design requirements of an information system for inventory management are investigated, applied on a case study for lot size calculation. Current trends in basic requirements of the design at the syntactic level of the system are reviewed; however, since it is no longer considered sufficient to exclusively examine the syntactical aspects of the system, this study is concerned with the development of a conceptual framework of a modelling environment for inventory management, which takes into account semantic/cognitive characteristics of the user/manager.
