Many formal modelling notations for business processes have been proposed during the last decade. They can be broadly classified into high-level visual notations, with an intuitive meaning, mainly addressed to the business management community and low-level foundational notations, with a detailed and formal semantics, mainly addressed to the computer science community. Role activity diagrams ar...

Nested state diagrams are a commonly accepted design notation for modelling complex software systems at different levels of detail. Besides nesting, other layering mechanisms are needed. However, incremental development of layered state diagrams raises the problem of change management. Changes made at high abstraction layers can have a serious impact on more concrete layers, as conflicts can be...

A basic problem of reverse engineering is to understand legacy systems and derive abstract characterizations of poorly documented software. In the case of objectoriented software, the static structure (e.g. inheritance and association relationships) can usually be understood easily, and it can be extracted from existing software using automated tools. This is due to the fact that the static asp...

Ion channels are ubiquitous in living systems. Through interactions with membrane potential, ion channels both control metabolic events and mediate cell communication. Consequentially, membrane bioelectricity bears on fields ranging from cancer etiology to computational neuroscience. Conductance models have proven successful in quantitatively capturing these dynamics but are often considered di...

People have a keen ability to reason about others’ mental states, which is central for communication and cooperation. A core question for cognitive science is what mental representations support this ability. We offer one proposal based on the framework of influence diagrams, an extension of Bayes nets that is suited for representing intentional goal-directed agents. We evaluate this framework ...

We describe our work on the prototype AutoJML tool which automatically derives JML (Java Modelling Language) specifications from UML state diagrams. UML is widely used for modelling Object-Oriented systems on an abstract level. It should be possible to test whether concrete program code actually implements a UML model. The generated JML specifications can be used for this. There exist tools to ...

One of the principal uses of UML is the modelling of synchronous object-oriented software systems, in which the behaviour of each of several classes is modelled using a state diagram. UML permits a transition of the state diagram to show both the event which causes the transition (typically, the fact that the object receives a message) and the object’s reaction (typically, the fact that the obj...

In this paper, a system consisting of single multi-state element (MSE) with performance rates and transition intensities presented as fuzzy values is introduced. Due to the lack, inaccuracy or fluctuation of collected data, it is often too difficult to evaluate the performance rates and transition intensities of multi-state element/system with precise value, especially in the continuous degrada...