Towards requirements for enactment mechanisms

Abstract

The issues we have discussed above have a number of implications for the design of formalisms or languages for constructing enactable process definitions, and for the design of process definition enactment mechanisms that would form part of process centered environments. At this stage, it would be premature to regard these implications as requirements, even in an informal sense, but we believe that they can provide a starting point for developing a systematic set of requirements in the near future.

We have also attempted to avoid making premature design decisions. For example, our discussion of process variables is, as far as possible, independent of any particular process definition paradigm. Constructs that corresponded to our notion of process variables could be included in a wide variety of new formalisms, or introduced as extensions to various existing formalisms, such as the programming language-like formalism of APPLA/A [8], the extended Petri net notations used in Archipel [5] or Process WEAVER

The design of a process definition formalism is, of course, intimately related to the design of an enactment mechanism for that formalism (which must implement the operational semantics of the formalism as well as providing run time services to users and other environment components). In what follows, these two issues are discussed separately, but it is important to recognize that design decisions about definition formalisms cannot be made independently of decisions about enactment mechanisms.