ASCEND stands for Advanced System for Computaions in ENgineering Design. ASCEND I was developed in 1978 -1982.

The primary use of ASCEND to date has been as a research tool at Carnegie Mellon. Students have used it since 1989 to model nonideal distillation, batch distillation, ammonia plants, ordinary and partial differential equations, architectural structures, membrane reactors and so forth.

Now, ASCEND IV is both a large-scale object-oriented mathematical modeling environment and a strongly typed mathematical modeling language. Although ASCEND has primarily been developed by Chemical Engineers, great care has been exercised to assure that it is domain independent. ASCEND can support modeling activities in fields from Architecture to (computational) Zoology.