TOWARDS BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN INTUITIVE AND FORMAL REPRESENTATIONS OF SYSTEMS LIFE CYCLE PROCESSES
Author(s):
Eric Simon,
Kilian Stoffel
Paper abstract: In systems life cycle management (SLCM), a gap exists between the informal methodologies for systems
development and the mathematical formalisms needed for the automatic validation of systems properties
and correctness proofs. This paper presents a model based on finite state machines and its translation into
Petri nets, a mathematical representation with the desired degree of provability in this context. We argue
that the model effectively bridges the gap between the intuitive representation of development processes
on one hand, and the formal model necessary for validation on the other hand, by allowing users without
scientific or technical background to represent their activities and all their key features using simple
automata, by applying a systems thinking approach to problem solving, instead of having to express the
model in a more complicated representation from the start. Also, this model shows very promising
results in other domains routinely modelled as activities, using other formalisms, like business processes.
