posted on 2016-12-06, 15:44authored byAndrew Butterfield, Anila Mjeda, John Noll
Process Modelling Language (PML) is a notation
for describing software development and business processes. It
takes the form of a shared-state concurrent imperative language
describing tasks as activities that require resources to start
and provide resources when they complete. Its syntax covers
sequential composition, parallelism, iteration and choice, but
without explicit iteration and choice conditions. It is intended
to support a range of context-sensitive interpretations, from a
rough guide for intended behaviour, to being very prescriptive
about the order in which tasks must occur. We are using Unifying
Theories of Programming (UTP) to model this range of semantic
interpretations, with formal links between them, typically of the
nature of a refinement. We address a number of challenges
that arise when trying to develop a compositional semantics
for PML and its shared-state concurrent underpinnings, most
notably in how UTP observations need to distinguish between
dynamic state-changes and static context parameters. The formal
semantics are intended as the basis for tool support for process
analysis, with applications in the healthcare domain, covering
such areas as healthcare pathways and software development
and certification processes for medical device software.
History
Publication
10th International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering (TASE);