Special Section on St.Eve workshop - Introduction

The purpose of the workshop was to stimulate discussion on these topics; in particular, participants have been confronted with the following questions: - What is the shape of your mental landscape, when you start conceiving a complex (concurrent, reactive, distributed) system? Is it a structure of state variables (relations, functions), or a pattern of events in time? - Is the choice between a state-oriented and an eventoriented approach dependent on the type of system to be described? How? - How does a system description in natural language affect the choice between state-oriented and eventoriented formalisation? - How does the requirements analysis process affect the choice? - The two approaches don't have to be mutually exlusive. Is it easy/desirable to move from one to the other? - At which stage of development would one do that? - Can one integrate the two approaches, keeping their individual advantages? - If so, can one formally refine a purely state-oriented or purely event-oriented description into a hybrid one? As suggested by some of the questions above, our aim was to specifically extend our investigations to the very early stages of system conception, including the 'preformal' brainstorming phase during which ideas about system behaviours pop up and are collected in a rather free, unstructured manner. In this respect, we were potentially open to interdisciplinary contributions, e.g. from areas such as cognitive psychology and natural language processing.