The Event Coordination Notation: Behaviour Modelling Beyond Mickey Mouse.

The Event Coordination NotationECNO allows modelling the desired behaviour of a software system on top of any object-oriented software. Together with existing technologies from Model-based Software EngineeringMBSE for automatically generating the software for the structural parts, ECNO allows generating fully functional software from a combination of class diagrams and ECNO models. What is more, software generated from ECNO models, integrates with existing software and software generated by other technologies. ECNO started out from some challenges in behaviour modelling and some requirements on behaviour modelling approaches, which we pointed out in a paper presented at the second BMFA workshop [1]; the integration with pre-existing software was but one of these requirements. Different ideas and concepts of ECNO have been presented before --- mostly with neat and small examples, which exhibit one special aspect of ECNO or another; and it would be fair to call them "Mickey Mouse examples". In this paper, we give a concise overview of the motivation, ideas, and concepts of ECNO. More importantly, we discuss a larger system, which was completely generated from the underlying models: a workflow management system. This way, we demonstrate that ECNO can be used for modelling software beyond the typical Mickey Mouse examples. This example demonstrates that the essence of workflow management --- including its behaviour --- can be captured in ECNO: in a sense, it is a domain model of workflow management, from which a fully functioning workflow engine can be generated.