Strong splitting in stable homogeneous models

We study elementary submodels of a stable homogeneous structure. We improve the independence relation defined in [T. Hyttinen, On nonstructure of elementary submodels of a stable homogeneous structure, Fundamenta Mathematicae, 156(1998): 167-182]. We apply this to prove a structure theorem. We also show that dop and sdop are essentially equivalent, where the negation of dop is the property we use in our structure theorem and sdop implies nonstructure.