Some academic work has been done in several areas, and the future of these methods is uncertain. IDEF 5 through 14 exist today in various stages and are intended to provide the capability to describe additional views listed in Table 1. A brief overview of IDEF0 will give you a feel for some process modeling basics associated with IDEF modeling. Inputs are the typical things such as resources consumed or transformed by a process. Output are the typical things created by the transformations of the inputs by the process.
Controls are the standards, policies, guidelines, etc.
Figure 1 is an abstract view of IDEF0 notation. The hierarchy of diagrams is maintained via a numbering schema that ties parent and child diagrams. Figure 2 shows this with an A0, A1, and A12 numbering as an example. A simple use of ICOMs in a high-level IDEF0 functional process model is shown in Figure 3. The overall process represented is a software system modification.