MODELING TEMPORAL REQUIREMENTS OF PROCESSES

Processes are ubiquitous for modeling dynamic phenomena in many areas like business, production, health care, robotics etc. Many of these applications require to adequately deal with temporal aspects: durations, deadlines, temporal constraints and goals. Nevertheless, temporal aspects are not yet prominently treated in requirements engineering or business process management. Models for representing requirements need to express temporal properties of the context resp. the environment, which have to be considered for designing systems. And they need to express temporal conditions, which have to be satisfied or which represent properties of goals that should be reached. Models, therefore, contain constructs for durations, temporal constraints like admissible time-span between events, and deadlines. Furthermore, these models need a notion of correctness and we discuss different notions like satisfiability and controllability. We also present techniques, which can be employed to check whether temporal requirements are conflicting and to derive temporal properties.