Stepwise and Rigorous Development of Evolving Concurrent Information Systems: From Semi-formal Objects to Sound Evolving Components

Most of existing software are nowadays characterized as complex information systems. For their crucial phase of specification / validation, the present paper proposes to perceive information systems as fully distributed, autonomous yet cooperating evolving concurrent components. The formal specification / validation framework for this advanced perception is an adequate integration of object concepts with modularity features into an appropriately tailored variant of algebraic Petri nets. For a true (intra- and inter-object) concurrent exhibition and symbolic computation, this integration referred to as Co-nets is semantically interpreted using an adaptation of rewriting logic.