Process Families at the Focus of Research

In October 2003 the project PESOA (Process Family Engineering in Service-Oriented Applications) started, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Technology. Participating in this project are:

• Delta Software Technology GmbH
• DaimlerChrysler AG (Research and Technology)
• Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE)
• Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering
• University of Leipzig (Commercial Information Technology)

HyperSenses works as the main platform for process transformations within PESOA.

As a project supported by the Ministry of Research, PESOA is part of the current research programme "Software Engineering 2006". Its goal is the reinforcement of Germany as an ideal location for software companies. The project's financial scope is Euro 4 million, with a funded share of Euro 2.4 million.

The main goal of this project is the implementation of a process family engineering platform. Therefore, domain engineering techniques and product line engineering concepts should be applied to processes – further supplemented by generative techniques. In short, we want to apply the idea of system families to processes.

The areas of automotive and e-business serve as domains for examples of process models. According to this, the concepts developed for PESOA are applied to and verified with examples from two kinds of processes – technical processes and business processes.

The center of current activities is the modeling of variability within processes, as well as the transformation of process models to target platforms.

Process Transformations with HyperSenses

Delta Software Technology has undertaken the task to implement the generation technologies for PESOA process transformations. Therefore the HyperSenses technology is the main instrument: Because of the differentiation of several modeling levels and comfortable tool support – especially for the development of patterns – HyperSenses becomes the ideal platform for the implementation of process transformations.

In this context the key goal is the consideration of different process modeling languages and notations. Using HyperSenses, we want to handle technical processes as well as business processes. In particular we want to import appropriate input data. The transformations should be performed based on a generic process meta model, i.e. there is a common understanding of process definitions and variability. The support on the one hand of very different output formats and on the other hand the different target platforms is an integral part of the concept of HyperSenses.

Delta regards the usage of its own newest technologies for the PESOA project as an important seal of approval. The PESOA project will result in significant advances related to the further development of our core technologies, as well as the commercial products based on them.