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，可能也是最重要的一个，是企业资源规划系统(ERP)，它在全球拥有180亿美元的市场。为了管理成本，企业购买COTS(商业货架)就像是ERP，但这迫使他们调整业务流程以适应COTS，降低了他们开发创新业务战略的灵活性和能力，并将他们锁定在一个几乎没有讨价还价能力的单一供应商来控制维护成本。这项提议旨在提供一种更灵活的设计方式，以便更好地匹配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名为API的平台上构建，并将其构建IS的能力从用户界面扩展到服务和数据库。我们要解决三个问题：重用、验证和插装。在信息系统建设中，重用是一个关键的生产力和质量问题。例如，赫兹的汽车租赁系统可能与预算公司的非常相似，但并不完全相同。我们希望研究规范级别的重用机制，以便可以构建通用规范，例如为汽车租赁系统构建通用规范，并针对特定的企业环境实例化和定制它，同时保留在通用级别指定的属性和功能。API平台消除了大部分设计和实现的需要，这意味着还消除了单元、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规范，并满足业务需求。这可以通过设计测试场景来手动完成。我们可以更进一步地使用现代验证技术，要么使用定理证明，要么使用模型检验。

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.