However, existing products can already cope successfully with reasonably complex systems in practice. Formal methods from logic, algebra and process theory have been successfully applied, for instance in query and transaction processing, but they are not in general standard engineering practice yet. Distributed reactive systems are still an order of magnitude more complex and difficult to specify, analyse, implement and reconfigure. They are not well understood, and methods for designing, implementing and reengineering them have not yet reached a level of mature and sound engineering practice. A great challenge is to cope with concurrency, synchronization, and communication at an appropriate level of abstraction.
Process theory provides useful theoretical concepts for concurrency and interaction.
A possible approach is to adopt concepts from process algebras which provide compositional system descriptions and formalize dynamic behavior. However, many conceptional and theoretical questions then arise. On the other hand, the developed concepts need to be investigated and evaluated in the light of concrete applications. Both these aspects will be the central concern of this seminar. In particular, we would like the following topics to be addressed Modelling and design methods.