My Research: Domain Engineering

Dines Bjørner, Fredsvej 11, DK-2840 Holte, Denmark

Dr.h.c., MAE, MRANS (AB), ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow
May 30, 2009

• A main research and engineering interest of mine over the last 15 or so years has been that of domains .
• Below I briefly try to define what is meant by a domain and by domain modelling.
• I then list some recent documents on domains and domain engineering: reports, papers, URLs.

What Do I Mean by 'Domain'

• By a domain I understand a universe of discourse
  • such as an area of human activitity (business, industry, service),
  • characterised by its own set of professional terms
  • and otherwise
    • pragmatically separable from
    • but possibly interfaced to (incl. overlapping with)
    other domains.
• Example domains are:
  • Airports,
  • Air Traffic (Bjørner) and Air Traffic (Kalsing)
  • Container Line Industry
    • containers,
    • container vessels,
    • container terminal ports,
    • container lines,
    • bill-of-lading / way bills,
    • ground transport,
    • etc.
  • Financial Service Industry
    • banking,
    • insurance,
    • securities trading (traders, brokers, stock exchange, etc.),
    • portfolio management,
    • etc.,
  • Health Care
    • hospitals, clinics, etc.,
    • private physicians, etc.,
    • pharmacies, the pharmaceutical industry,
    • health insurance,
    • national health board, etc.
    with initial emphasis on
    • patient medical records and
    • hospitalisation plans.
  • The Internet and the Web,
  • Logistics
  • Manufacturing
    • machining,
    • assembly,
    • etc.,
  • The Market
    • consumers,
    • retailers,
    • wholesalers,
    • producers and
    • distributors (the supply chain).
  • A Domain Model of Oil Pipelines
    An Exercise in Domain Engineering, with Michael Reichhardt Hansen, Summer 2009.
  • Transportation Domains: Paper 1: PS, Paper 2: PDF and Paper 3: PDF
    • roads,
    • rails,
    • air and
    • sea.
  • Etc.
• By domain modelling I understand
  • the construction of
  • informal and formal descriptions
  • of a domain.
• A domain model
  • describes, informally and formally,
  • the domain as it is ,
  • without reference to requirements, let alone new software.
  (Existing domain informatics [incl. IT] is, of course, described.)

References: Only to Earlier Work on Domains

2009

1. DRAFT BOOK: Domain & Requirements Engineering , April onwards 2009.
   As of May 30, 2009 this document is still a torso.
   The document, however, represents a most recent understanding of constituent issues of Domain Engineering.
   The document presents an altogether new view of requirements engineering -
   a, perhaps controversial, view which "debunks" much of today's 'requirements engineering' papers and books!
   Work in progress. Slides

2. REPORT: A Domain Model of Oil Pipelines
   An Exercise in Domain Engineering - with Michael Reichhardt Hansen, Summer 2009.
   (Material to come, covering temporal modelling of the dynmaics of oil flow - in Duration Calculus.)
   Work in progress.

3. REPORT: What is Logistics ?
   An engineering and experimental exercise in domain modelling.
   Work in progress.

4. PAPER: Rôle of Domain Engineering in Software Development: and Why Current Requirements Engineering is Flawed !
   Paper and Slides. PSI'09, Akademgorodok, Siberia, 15-19 June 2009.

5. PAPER: Mereologies in Computing Science: paper and slides
   Paper for Sir Tony Hoare's 75th Festschrift, April 16-17, 2009, Cambridge, UK. Presented at Cambridge 16 April, 2009.

6. RESEARCH MONOGRAPH (BOOK): Domain Engineering Published in Japan (spring 2009)
   Book is based on the reports etc. that I wrote during my 12 months sabbatical at JAIST 1.2.2006-31.1.2007.
   This monograph features 76 colour photos from Kanazawa and around that city of Western Japan.

7. TWO DRAFT BOOKS - put on hold:
   • Domain Engineering - 469 pages, late 2008 to March 2009.
   • Software Engineering - A Triptych Approach - 610 pages; early to mid 2008.
   I am working now on the draft book of item 1 above.

2008

Software Engineering - An Unended Quest ,
A critique of my three volume book: Software Engineering:
Did I achieve what I wanted? Shortcomings - Strengths!
Will contain a review of my work on domains.

2007

• Three Draft Domain Sketches
  • Click: An Emerging Report on the Financial Services Industry Domain

  • Click: An Emerging Postcript Report on the Transportation Domain
    This report is a basis for a course project in connection with my Nov.-Dec. 2007 lectures at Henri Poincare University of Nancy, France.

    This an incomplete rough sketch report. It will evolve towards a more complete and consistent state during the winter of 2007/2008.

    The intent is to domain model transportation nets of links and hubs, the states and state spaces of these (reflecting open/close status of links and hubs), routes, etc.; vehicles and convoys of vehicles; net modalties (like road, rail, air, sea); subnets like airline nets, shipping line nets, bus nets, cities versus country-side nets, etc.; traffic; scheduling of traffic; etc.

  • Click: A Container Line Industry Domain
    A rather large, approx. 100 page incomplete draft sketch.

• Click: From Domains to Requirements
  Draft invited paper for Ugo Montanari's 65th Anniv. Festschrift, May 2008, Springer LNCS

• Click: Development of Transportation Systems
  Invited paper for ISOLA 2007, Dec. 12-14, 2007

• Click: Lectures on Domain Engineering for the 2007 Lipari Summer School

• Click: Domain Theory: Practice and Theories
  - A Discussion of Possible Research Topics .
  Invited paper for ICTAC 2007

• Click: Believable Software Management
  Invited paper for Encyclopedia of Software Engineering ,
  Editor-in-Chief: Phillip A. Laplante, Penn State University,
  Taylor & Francis Group Publ., 2007

• Domain Engineering , Click: Chapter for BCS FACS Springer Book, eds. J.P.Bowen and P.Boca, forthcoming.

• (CO-EDITED) BOOK: Logics of Specification Languages. Edited with Martin C. Henson, late 2007.

2006

• 3 BOOKS: My Chef d'Oeuvre: Electronic Vol.1, Electronic Vol.2 and Electronic Vol.3 - late 2005 early 2006.

  Soon the above three books will appear in Chinese !

  "My" recent books with click !.

• Verified Software for Ubuiquitous Computing ,
  A Project Proposal: Click: PS
  presented at Click: 1AWCVS, Macau 29-31 Oct., 2006

• The Triptych Process Model: Process Assessment and Improvement :
  Click: paper and Click: slides for invited keynote talk at JASPIC 2006 Oct. 12-13, Tsukuba

• Documents: A Domain Analysis : Click: report and Click: slides.
  To possibly be edited into a possibly publishable paper.

• Transportation Nets : Click: incomplete report August 2006.
  To possibly be rewritten into a possibly publishable paper - some day!

• The Rôle of Domain Engineering in Software Development
  Invited keynote Click: paper and Click: talk: Click: IPSJ/SIGSE Software Engineering Symposium 2006, Oct. 21, 2006, Tokyo

2005

• Click: TRaiN - The Railway Domain

2004

• Dines Bjørner. The TRain Topical Day. In Building the Information Society, IFIP 18th World Computer Congress, Topical Sessions, 22-27 August, 2004, Toulouse, France - Ed. René Jacquart, pages 607-611. Kluwer Academic Publishers, August 2004. A Foreword.

• Dines Bjørner. Towards a Formal Model of CyberRail. In Building the Information Society, IFIP 18th World Computer Congress, Tpical Sessions, 22-27 August, 2004, Toulouse, France - Ed. René Jacquart, pages 657-664. Kluwer Academic Publishers, August 2004. Original report also listed some of DB's students as co-authors.

• Dines Bjørner. Dynamics of Railway Nets: On an Interface between Automatic Control and Software Engineering. In CTS2003: 10th IFAC Symposium on Control in Transportation Systems, Oxford, UK, August 4-6 2003. Elsevier Science Ltd. Symposium held at Tokyo, Japan. Editors: S. Tsugawa and M. Aoki.

2003

• Albena Kirilova Strupchanska, Martin Penicka, and Dines Bjørner. Railway Staff Rostering. In FORMS2003: Symposium on Formal Methods for Railway Operation and Control Systems. L'Harmattan Hongrie, 15-16 May 2003. Conf. held at Techn.Univ. of Budapest, Hungary. Editors: G. Tarnai and E. Schnieder, Germany.

• Martin Penicka, Albena Kirilova Strupchanska, and Dines Bjørner. Train Maintenance Routing. In FORMS'2003: Symposium on Formal Methods for Railway Operation and Control Systems. L'Harmattan Hongrie, 15-16 May 2003. Conf. held at Techn.Univ. of Budapest, Hungary. Editors: G. Tarnai and E. Schnieder, Germany.

2002

• Dines Bjørner, Chris W. George, and Søren Prehn. Computing Systems for Railways - A Role for Domain Engineering. Relations to Requirements Engineering and Software for Control Applications. In Integrated Design and Process Technology. Editors: Bernd Kraemer and John C. Petterson, P.O.Box 1299, Grand View, Texas 76050-1299, USA, 24-28 June 2002. Society for Design and Process Science.

• Dines Bjørner. Domain Models of "The Market" - in Preparation for E-Transaction Systems. In Practical Foundations of Business and System Specifications (Eds.: Haim Kilov and Ken Baclawski), The Netherlands, December 2002. Kluwer Academic Press.

2001

• Dines Bjørner. Informatics Models of Infrastructure Domains. In Computer Science and Information Technologies, pages 13-73, Yerevan, Armenia, September 17-20 2001. National Academy of Sciences of Armenia, Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems.

2000

• Dines Bjørner. Domain Engineering, A Software Engineering Discipline in Need of Research. In SOFSEM'2000: Theory and Practice of Informatics, volume 1963 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 1-17, Milovy, Czech Republic, November 25 - December 2 2000. Springer Verlag.

• Dines Bjørner. Formal Software Techniques in Railway Systems. In Eckehard Schnieder, editor, 9th IFAC Symposium on Control in Transportation Systems, pages 1-12, Technical University, Braunschweig, Germany, 13-15 June 2000. VDI/VDE-Gesellschaft Mess- und Automatisieringstechnik, VDI-Gesellschaft für Fahrzeug- und Verkehrstechnik. Invited talk.

• Dines Bjørner. Domain Engineering: "Upstream" from Requirements Engineering and Software Design. US ONR + Univ. of Genoa Workshop, Santa Margherita Ligure, June 2000. Ed.: Egidio Astesiano et al. Dept. of Informatics, Genoa Univ., Italy.

1999

• Dines Bjørner. A Triptych Software Development Paradigm: Domain, Requirements and Software. Towards a Model Development of A Decision Support System for Sustainable Development. In Ernst-R``udiger Olderog and Bernhard Steffen, editors, Festschrift to Hans Langmaack: Correct Systems Design: Recent Insight and Advances, volume 1710 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 29-60. University of Kiel, Germany, Springer-Verlag, October 1999.

• Dines Bjørner. Domain Modelling: Resource Management Strategics, Tactics and Operations, Decision Support and Algorithmic Software. In Jim Davies, Bill Roscoe, and Jim Woodcock, editors, Millenial Perspectives in Computer Science, Cornerstones of Computing (Ed.: Richard Bird and Tony Hoare), pages 23-40, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS, UK, 2000. Palgrave (St. Martin's Press). An Oxford University and Microsoft Symposium in Honour of Sir Anthony Hoare, September 13-14, 1999.

1998

• Dines Bjørner. Domains as Prerequisites for Requirements and Software etc. In M. Broy and B. Rumpe, editors, RTSE'97: Requirements Targeted Software and Systems Engineering, volume 1526 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 1-41. Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg, 1998.

1997

• Dines Bjørner. From Domain Engineering via Requirements to Software. Formal Specification and Design Calculi. In SOFSEM'97, volume 1338 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 219-248. Springer-Verlag, November 1997.

Etcetera.

Some Common ('Domain') Misconceptions

• A 'domain', as defined here, is not a type, as in for example Scott's 'domain theory'.
  Apologies to Dana!
• A 'domain model' is not the same as a 'problem frame', as in Michael A. Jackson's work.
  • The methodological principles, techniques and tools
  • as well as a recording of all the design alternatives and choices
  • applied during a software development,
  • from domains via requirements to design
  • together, to us, form a problem frame.
• The 2006 paper listed above (Year 2006, item 4) from the IWAAPF relates domains to problem frames - I think.
• Our notion of "Domain Engineering" is not to be confused with those of
  • Domain Engineering Inc. and
  • Domain Engineering (Wikipedia !). See also: Domain Engineering, a Model-based Approach

About this document ...

My Research: Domain Engineering

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