Mechanisms for Generic Process Support

Abstract

As more and more programming environments incorporate explicit process descriptions, generic process capabilities will become crucial to the convenient instantiation and maintenance of process description. However, partly because process modeling languages have followed the example of programming languages in general, they are surprisingly weak in supporting generic process descriptions.We propose mechanisms whereby generic process capability can be added to any process formalism. The generic portions of the process description can then be refined through instantiation. We define a system architecture in which a generic process description can be refined gradually during its enactment. Such capabilities will be crucial to incorporating explicit process descriptions into the program environments of the future.