Automatic process design from nonprocedural specification

Abstract

AbstractThere are very few systems for automatic process designing despite its importance in the middle software development phase. A theory for designing a process flow depending on the functional dependency between a data item and the structure of the data was postulated and an automatic process design system ECS/P was then developed. EOS/P inputs a nonprocedural specification of business data processing, wherein the relationship between attributes of entities and associations are represented as a set of equations. These attributes are modified here by identifiers of entities and associations. These modifications may be single‐step or multistep by way of associations. The purpose of EOS/P is to generate specifications, each of which can perform the required process without storing the intermediate results in outer files. Therefore, the first EOS/P creates for each multistep modification merged files that include both the modifier entity and the modified entity; then by using these files a series of single‐step modified process specifications equivalent to the given multistep modified specification are generated. Furthermore, in this transformation, appropriate intermediate files are created when order‐clash and structure‐clash are detected in files. The finally generated specifications can be transformed automatically into COBOL programs by our previously proposed automatic module design system EOS/M and automatic programming system SPACE.