Five Generic Processes for Behavior Description in Software Engineering

Abstract

Behavior modeling and software architecture specification are attracting more attention in software engineering. Describing both of them in integrated models yields numerous advantages for coping with complexity since the models are platform independent. They can be decomposed to be developed independently by experts of the respective fields, and they are highly reusable and may be subjected to formal analysis. Typically, behavior is defined as the occurrence of an action, a pattern over time, or any change in or movement of an object. In systems studies, there are many different approaches to modeling behavior, such as grounding behavior simultaneously on state transitions, natural language, and flowcharts. These different descriptions make it difficult to compare objects with each other for consistency. This paper attempts to propose some conceptual preliminaries to a definition of behavior in software engineering. The main objective is to clarify the research area concerned with system behavior aspects and to create a common platform for future research. Five generic elementary processes (creating, processing, releasing, receiving, and transferring) are used to form a unifying higher-order process called a thinging machine (TM) that is utilized as a template in modeling behavior of systems. Additionally, a TM includes memory and triggering relations among stages of processes (machines). A TM is applied to many examples from the literature to examine their behavioristic aspects. The results show that a TM is a valuable tool for analyzing and modeling behavior in a system.

Thinging-Based Conceptual Modeling: Case Study of a Tendering System

“…To demonstrate modeling in TM, Section V presents an actual government organization. More information about the TM model can be found in Al-Fedaghi (2019a;2019b;2019c).…”

Modeling Network Security: Case Study of Email System

“…According to Wong [18], tackling wicked problems can be achieved by conceptualizing them as systems and breaking them down into "chunks of information" or digestible nodes and their relationships. In describing the model for email operational security, we use the thinging machine (TM) model [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28] where all operational elements are conceptualized in terms of a single ontological entity, the thimac (thing/machine). As we show, thimacs can represent heterogeneous entities: physical entities (e.g., a server, router, or workstation), software objects (e.g., a program or software system), and other notions (e.g., protocols, flows, or plans).…”

“…If the destination has the same current information domain (26), then the packet flows (27) to be processed (28) for comparison with preconfigured mailboxes (29).…”

Three Levels of Modeling: Static (Structure/Trajectories of Flow), Dynamic (Events) and Behavioral (Chronology of Events)

“…This section will briefly review the TM model to establish TM as a foundation to study behavior. A more elaborate discussion of TM's philosophical foundation can be found in [14][15][16][17][18][19][20].…”