Towards a three-level methodology for developing cooperative information systems

The objective of this paper is to present our first results towards a three-level methodology for developing advanced information systems as fully distributed, autonomous yet cooperative components. The proposed methodology aims to deal with the main phases in developing such systems, namely analysis / specification phase, validation phase and implementation phase. For the analysis / specification level we follow the OMTROLL approach, that is, first different system classes are grapically modeled using the OMT object model with communication and state diagrams, and then structural and behavioural aspects of such components are specified using the TROLL language. At the validation level we propose an object oriented Petri net-based model named CO-NETS that we are developing. The two levels are intrinsically connected through a semi-automatic generation of CO-NET components from different OMTROLL descriptions. CO-NETS validation is achieved mainly through graphical animation accompanied by a concurrent computation based on its semantics expressed in rewriting logic with a full exhibition of intra- as well as inter-object concurrency. The proposed approach is illustrated using a significant and a realistic part of a production system case study. (orig.)SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RR 4485(2000,5) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman