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

信息系统（IS）在当今的经济中非常普遍。企业资源计划系统（ERP）是信息系统的一个典型例子，可能也是最重要的一个例子，它在全球拥有180亿美元的市场。为了管理成本，企业正在购买像erp这样的COTS（商用货架），但是这迫使他们调整他们的业务过程以适应COTS，降低了他们开发创新业务策略的灵活性和能力，并将他们锁定在单个供应商上，在控制维护成本方面几乎没有议价能力。该建议旨在提供一种更灵活的设计信息系统的方法，以更好地适应组织所面临的快速发展的环境。我们希望在过去五年开发的api平台上进行构建，并扩展其构建信息系统的能力，从用户界面到服务和数据库。我们想要解决三个方面的问题：重用、验证和工具。重用是信息系统建设中一个关键的生产力和质量问题。例如，Hertz的汽车租赁系统可能与Budget的非常相似，但并不完全相同。我们希望在规范级别上研究重用机制，这样就可以构建通用规范，例如，为汽车租赁系统，并对其进行实例化并针对特定的企业环境进行定制，同时保留在通用级别上指定的属性和功能。api平台消除了对设计和实现的大部分需求，这意味着也消除了单元、集成和系统测试。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工完成。我们可以通过使用现代验证技术，通过使用定理证明或模型检查来更进一步。

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.