Component Composition in Business and System Modelling

Bespoke development of large business systems can be couched in terms of the composition of components, which are, put simply, chunks of development work. Design, mapping a specification to an implementation, can also be expressed in terms of components: a refinement comprising an abstract component, a concrete component and a mapping between them. Similarly, system extension is the composition of an existing component, the legacy system, with a new component, the extension. This paper overviews work being done on a UK EPSRC funded research project formulating and formalizing techniques for describing, composing and performing integrity checks on components. Although the paper focuses on the specification and development of information systems, the techniques are equally applicable to the modeling and re-engineering of businesses, where no computer system may be involved

Language-independent model transformation verification

One hinderance to model transformation verification is the large number of different MT languages which exist, resulting in a large number of different language-specific analysis tools. As an alternative, we define a single analysis process which can, in principle, analyse speci- fications in several different transformation languages, by making use of a common intermediate representation to express the semantics of trans- formations in any of these languages. Some analyses can be performed directly on the intermediate representation, and further semantic models in specific verification formalisms can be derived from it. We illustrate the approach by applying it to ATL

Using Artificial Intelligence for the Specification of m-Health and e-Health Systems

Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as machine learning (ML) have wide application in medical informatics systems. In this chapter, we employ AI techniques to assist in deriving software specifications of e-Health and m-Health systems from informal requirements statements. We use natural language processing (NLP), optical character recognition (OCR), and machine learning to identify required data and behaviour elements of systems from textual and graphical requirements documents. Heuristic rules are used to extract formal specification models of the systems from these documents. The extracted specifications can then be used as the starting point for automated software production using model-driven engineering (MDE). We illustrate the process using an example of a stroke recovery assistant app and evaluate the techniques on several representative systems

A Real-time Action Logic of Objects

This paper presents work performed in the EPSRC ''Object-oriented Specification of Reactive and Real-time Systems'' project. It aims to extend the Object Calculus of Fiadeira and Mailbaum to cover durative actions and real-time constraints. We define a core logic, termed ''Real-time action logic'' (RAL) which can provide an axiomatic semantics and reasoning framework for concurrent, real-time and object-oriented specification languages. The logic could also be viewed as providing the basis of a specification language in its own right. We show how a model action logic (MAL) and real-time logic (RTL) for reasoning about concurrent object-oriented pograms and specifications can be derived from RAL, and indicate how this formalism can be used to provide an axiomatic semantics for a large part of the object-oriented specification language VDM++