Behavioral Specifications of Businesses and Systems

This text deals with the reading, writing and understanding of specifications. The papers presented in this book describe useful concepts and practices (in programming and in specifications) and solid underlying theory that is of interest and importance to those who deal with increased complexity of business and systems. Most concepts have been successfully used in actual industrial projects, while others are from the forefront of research. Authors include practitioners, business thinkers, academics and applied mathematicians. These papers address different aspects of a single problem - taming complexity. The text emphasizes simplicity in specifications without concentrating on particular methodologies, languages or tools. It shows how to handle complexity and how to succeed in understanding and specifying businesses and systems based upon abstract concepts. The text is the second volume of papers based on a series of workshops held alongside ACM's annual conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications (OOPSLA) and European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP).The first volume, Object-Oriented Behavioral Specifications, edited by Haim Kilov and William Harvey, was published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1996.