JISE


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Journal of Information Science and Engineering, Vol. 11 No. 2, pp. 183-206


A Validation Assistant for A Distributed Office Information System Modeled by Office Procedure Model


Fang Yie Leu, Shi-Kuo Chang*and Chien-Chiao Yang#
Department of Computer and Information Science 
Tung Hai University 
Taiwan, R.O.C. 
*Department of Computer Science 
University of Pittsburgh 
Pittsburgh, PA 15260 
#Department of Electronic Engineering 
National Taiwan Institute of Technology 
Taiwan, R.O.C.


    In this paper, we propose a validation assistant that can assist its users in validating the cooperation and the relationships of messages manipulated by a workstation in a distributed office information system (OIS) modeled by the Office Procedure Model (OPM) to see whether or not the underlying workstation can accurately handle these messages to respond to the occurrence of some specific events. OPM is a formal model that can formally describe and simulate the activities performed by an office agent (a human user) in an OIS. Some unimportant office activities are removed from the OPM diagram to reduce its complexity. A connection matrix representing the simplified diagram is constructed. The algorithm that further partitions the diagram into several message groups to again reduce the scope for easy analysis is also introduced. Finally, for each message group, we set up a Transition Table from which the expressions, in conjunctive normal form, of the objects in the diagram can be derived. Users can inspect the expressions one by one to validate their systems.


Keywords: system validation, transition table, distributed office information system, conjunctive normal form

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