A Framework for Integrating ESL Tools - IRIT

4 Pierre-Yves Pillain, Joel Champeau, Hanh Nhi Tran
To support MBE process modeling, MODAL aligns the definition of work product
to model to allow specifying the metamodel typing a model as well as the model’s
lifecycle and inter-model relationships. MODAL also formalizes the Constraint
concept associated to process activities to insure the consistency of the process.
Thanks to the refinement of work product definition, the pre and post-conditions of an
activity can be better expressed as the constraints defined on products (models)
manipulated by the activity. The execution of process activities hence can be guarded
by more formal constraints insuring a finer grained causality in the definition of
processes. This approach is of great importance in the context of MBE processes
where wide scope languages are used.
One of MODAL’s special features is the separation of process’ intentions from
their realization to facilitate process definition and analysis. MODAL introduces the
concept Intention defining a methodological objective set by various stakeholders.
When defining an intention, MODAL allows specifying and putting together several
aspects of process need on products (business rules), tools (technical constraints) and
required standards (organization constraints) for example. An intention can be
satisfied by one or more strategies representing different technical solutions. MODAL
defines the relationship “satisfy” between the intentions and creates intention maps to
guide process designers choosing an appropriate strategy in a specific technical space
to realize a process satisfying all intentions.
An intention can be associated to a work product definition representing the result
obtained when the intention is satisfied. This relation can help classifying work
products according to their intention, but it cannot allow verifying if a concrete work
product obtained during the process’ execution satisfies the associated intention. To
enable such a validation, we associate an intention to an activity (or a TaksDefinition,
a ProcessComponent) and assure that the activity’s output product and the intention’s
product is the same. When executed, the activity’s post-conditions expressed on the
output product’s content will be automatically verified to validate the satisfaction of
process intention associated to the activity.
Fig. 2. Trustworthy specification process
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