Formal reuse and validation of information system specifications/Réutilisation et validation formelle des spécifications de systèmes d'information

信息系统（IS）在当今经济中非常普遍。 信息系统的一个典型例子，可能是最重要的一个，是企业资源规划系统（ERP），其全球市场价值180亿美元。 为了管理成本，企业正在购买COTS（商用货架），就像ERP一样，但这迫使他们调整业务流程以适应COTS，降低了他们制定创新业务战略的灵活性和能力，并将其锁定在一个单一的供应商，几乎没有讨价还价的能力来控制维护成本。 该提案旨在提供一种更灵活的设计IS的方式，以更好地适应组织所面临的快速发展的环境。 我们希望建立在我们过去五年开发的平台上，称为APIS，并扩展其构建IS的功能，从用户界面到服务和数据库。 我们希望解决三个方面的问题：重用、验证和工具化。 重用是信息系统建设中的一个关键生产力和质量问题。 例如，赫兹的汽车租赁系统可能非常类似于预算的，但不完全相同。 我们希望在规范级别研究重用机制，以便可以构建通用规范，例如，为一个汽车租赁系统，实例化它并为一个特定的企业环境定制它，同时保留在一般级别指定的属性和功能。 APIS平台消除了大部分设计和实现的需求，这意味着单元，集成和系统测试也被消除。 然而，仍然需要执行验证和验收测试，以确保系统规范是适当的，它满足业务需求。 这可以通过设计测试场景手动完成。 我们可以通过使用现代验证技术更进一步，无论是使用定理证明还是模型检查。

Information systems (IS) are prevalent in today's economy. A typical example of IS, and probably the most important one, is the Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERP), with its 18 billion $ worldwide market. To manage costs, enterprises are buying COTS (commercial of the shelf) IS like ERPs, but that forces them to adapt their business process to the COTS, reducing their flexibility and ability to develop innovative business strategies, and locking them with a single vendor with little bargaining power for controlling maintenance costs. This proposal aims at providing a more flexible way of designing IS that better match the rapidly evolving environment that organisations are facing. We want to build on the platform that we have developed over the past five years, called APIS, and extend its capabilities for building an IS, from the user interface to services and databases. There are three axes we want to address: reuse, validation and instrumentation. Reuse is a key productivity and quality issue in IS building. For instance, Hertz's car rental system is probably very similar to Budget's, but not exactly the same. We want to study reuse mechanisms at the specification level, so that one can build a generic specification, e.g., for a car rental system, and instantiate it and tailor it for a specific enterprise environment, while preserving the properties and the capabilities specified at the generic level. The APIS platform eliminates most of the need for design and implementation, which means that unit, integration and system testing are also eliminated. However, there is still a need to perform validation and acceptance testing, to make sure that the system specification is the appropriate one, that it satisfies business requirements. This can be done manually, by designing tests scenarios. We could go a step further by using modern verification technology, either by using theorem proving or model checking.