Fundamental Modeling Concepts

Dr. Andreas Knöpfel is an FMC expert and learnt much about its practical value during his four years at SAP. He now works as a system analyst and requirements engineer. Dr. Bernhard Gröne worked at SAP for 5 years as system analyst and architect. Following that, he completed his PhD at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute at the University of Potsdam. His research topics are analyzing and modeling complex systems and patterns.Dr. Peter Tabeling has several years of industrial and academic experience in the modeling of complex systems, among them SAP's R/3 system. He is currently Assistant Professor at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute at the University of Potsdam, where he researches and gives lectures on FMC and other topics.

• Foreword. Preface.1 Introduction.1.1 The need for communication.1.2 The FMC Idea.1.3 Outline of this book.2 Compositional Structures.2.1 An example: The travel agency.2.2 Modeling the structure of a system.2.3 Agents accessing storages.2.4 Agents communicate via channels.2.5 Summary.2.6 Exercises.3 Dynamic Structures.3.1 Petrinets: Basic principles.3.2 Conflicts and conditions.3.3 Basic patterns.3.4 Responsibilities and scope boundaries.3.5 Summary.3.6 Exercises.4 Value Structures and Mind Maps.4.1 Entity sets and relationships.4.2 Cardinalities.4.3 Predicates and roles.4.4 Partitions.4.5 Reification.4.6 Summary.4.7 Exercises.5 FMC Basics: Summary.6 Reinforcing the Concepts.6.1 The meta model: A mind map to FMC.6.2 Operational versus control state.6.3 Block diagrams: Advanced concepts.6.4 Petrinets: Advanced concepts.6.5 Non-hierarchical transformations and semantic layers.6.6 Exercises.7 Towards Implementation Structures.7.1 System structure versus software structure.7.2 From Processor to processes.7.3 Distribution, concurrency and synchronization.7.4 From FMC to objects and classes.7.5 Conceptual patterns versus software patterns.8 Applying FMC in Your Daily Work.8.1 Becoming comfortable with FMC.8.2 Describing existing systems with FMC.8.3 Using FMC in construction.8.4 Using FMCdiagrams to support communication.8.5 Guidelines for didactical modeling.8.6 Cost and benefit of modeling.9 Modeling and Visualization Guidelines.9.1 Introduction.9.2 Increasingt he reader’s perception.9.3 Increasing comprehension.9.4 Secondary notation, patterns and pitfalls.10 Relationship with Other Modeling Approaches.10.1 Comparing FMC with Structured Analysis.10.2 FMC and the Unified Modeling Language.11 A System of Server Patterns 24711.1 Applicationdomain.11.2 A pattern language for request processing servers.11.3 Example applications.11.4 Conclusion and further research.Epilogue.A Solutions.B Reference Sheets.C Glossary.References.Index.