Development methodologies for event and message based application systems

Abstract

Very few of the existing software analysis and design methodologies provide a facility for developing and specifying system components containing cooperating parallel processes. In this paper we develop a general specification technique which allows to precisely describe processes, process-classes, events and messages.

The proposed methodology is based on Petri Nets which have been extended with higher level concepts to allow the straight forward specification of processes and their cooperation and to avoid the principle problem of Petri Nets, i.e. the large complexity of such nets when specifying even simple mechanisms.

Care has been taken to provide for the adaption of the many formal analysis principles available for Petri Nets to the proposed technique. The development, design and specification technique is then used to extend four of the most popular design methodologies — Jackson, SADT, HIPO and Nassi Shneiderman — with process and event/message specification facilities.