In: Volume 2817 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 60-70. August 2003.
Abstract: Most of existing software are nowadays characterized as complex information systems. For their crucial phase of specification / validation, the present paper proposes to perceive information systems as fully distributed, autonomous yet cooperating evolving concurrent components. The formal specification / validation framework for this advanced perception is an adequate integration of object concepts with modularity features into an appropriately tailored variant of algebraic Petri nets. For a true (intra- and inter-object) concurrent exhibition and symbolic computation, this integration referred to as Co-nets is semantically interpreted using an adaptation of rewriting logic. More precisely, we first propose a clear incremental methodology for constructing complex information systems starting from their informal UML-based diagrammatic description and leading to interacting Co-nets components. As a second-level of reusability we then gradually endow each component with a Petri-net based meta-level for coping with runtime behavioural changes in each component. This leads not only to keep component specifications always updated and running but also to reconfigure the architecture of the system in a runtime way. All these issues are illustrated using a simplified banking system case study.