Information Systems Development Using a Combination of Process and Rule Based Approaches

During the last years, the time aspect in information systems development has been addressed by several researchers [2], [8], [6]. Organisations are dynamic by nature and thus, the importance of modelling time explicitly in systems engineering approaches is crucial. This paper proposes a way of integrating process and rule based approaches in information systems development. Both static and dynamic aspects including the temporal dimension can be described. We envisage an approach with incremental specifications where details are successively added until we arrive at a specification from which executable code can be automatically generated. The output from this process (i.e., a set of rules) should be compatible with a rule manager which controls the execution of the system. A prototype has been developed to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach and is briefly described.