Typology and Modeling Profiles of Moving-Class Process-Entity Interactions: Core Types, Relationships, Constraints and Subschemas

Abstract

Most of scientific research that are immediately concerned with the development of domain digital models, to one degree or another, is aimed at the derivation of reference conceptual and logical constructions covering all pertinent classes of interactions in which real-world objects with concomitant constraints can be involved. This work is directed to forming the core of a structural template that models facts — instances of associates that arise during the movement (transportation) of freights. The multiple alternatives and high variability of any processes logic, including moving-class processes, make their complete unification problematic. Nevertheless, one can come down to process modeling from a system-wide perspective, focusing on the capture of universal permanent processes components, such as source and output sets of objects, associations and constraints. The reality exhibits examples of hierarchical coherence of any classes of generalized processes, which in their sequential development break up into several self-sufficient processes distributed between organizational, calendar and implementation phases. The main focus of the work is on the sequential (from simple to complex) configuration of the structural core of process-entity interactions in the organizational phase, covering route segments, transport and freights, as well as the study of constraints on permissible instances of links incoming into the corresponding associative complex. Conceptual diagrams are presented in simplified and thorough formats. In a simplified format, multi-valued dependencies are modeled by means of weak entities and relators. In a thorough format, weak entities and relators have been replaced with documentary types, the structures of which contain an eXhaustive set of information about all objects, including auXiliary ones that are involved in interactions. The paper also considers the influence of the environment that is represented by classifying sets on the content of bounded relationships operating between the entity and process types. We have ascertained, formalized and described all constraints appearing in the organizational phase of generalized transport process including new constraint kind — split dependent link, resulting from the formation of cycles in conceptual constructions. Similar cycles contain and link together split, entity and (or) process types.