the arcadia research project  the arcadia research project is being conducted by the arcadia consortium to develop innovative technology in support of advanced project support environments. the arcadia consortium consists of a collection of separately- funded, informally coordinated research and development projects at the university of california at irvine, the university of colorado at boulder, the university of massachusetts at amherst, stanford university, the aerospace corporation, incremental systems corporation, and trw defense systems group1. some individuals who have moved to other organizations remain active participants in the consortium.  the arcadia project is expected to provide significant advances in the ability to construct environments with such key characteristics as: scalability to the demands of very large projects; adaptability to differences among projects and unforeseen changes; extensibility to accommodate technology evolution; and pro-active support for the automatable aspects of the software life-cycle. aspects of these characteristics may become available for use in the environments of the mid-to-late 1990s.  among the research areas being investigated by the consortium are: a) environment architecture, to provide an interaction model and execution framework for all environment components; b) process research and programming, to develop and automate improved software life-cycle models and to devise process programming language capabilities; c) object management, to provide enhanced support for advanced typing models and persistent object management; d) user interface management, to provide for graphical human-computer interaction interface methodology and system support; e) language support, to provide for standard representations and tool-building aids in support of multiple languages; f) analysis, to provide for improved analytical capabilities in support of software development; g) measurement and evaluation, to provide for improved automated support for analyzing and evaluating software processes and environment components. the research approach emphasizes the role of process programming and its impact on both the environment architecture and the user interaction metaphor.  the consortium members have already made contributions in several of these areas, including (but not limited to):  iris, "intermediate representation including semantics", a new intermediate representation for programs that is structurally uniform and can be semantically adapted to accommodate different programming languages;  chiron, a prototype user interface methodology and system based on the ideas of separation of tool functionality from object depiction and separation of an abstract depiction from the physical depiction of objects;  pgraphite, a prototype application generator for persistent and transient graphical data structures in ada programs;  appl/a, a prototype process programming language based on ada, extending it to include, for example, programmable relations, and triggered effects;  pmdb+, an extension of the project master data base conceptual model to include behavior of processes; and  anna, an annotation language and toolset to support formalization in software development practices.  ploiting the advantages of the inheritance relation. furthermore, particular transitions in the nets (e.g. transitions allocating persons to activities and documents or defining certain preconditions) can be described in a rule-based manner thus exploiting the benefits of declarative programming.  a first and very rapid prototype of an fpe based on the above mentioned ideas about the process modeling language has been developed on top of the ai tool kee (knowledge engineering environment). however, the current specimen work is concentrating on developing a stable language definition and an fpe which fits into the framework of the esf reference architecture.  the current specimen consortium lead by the university of dortmund/stz (d) incorporates as further members cap sesa innovation in grenoble (f), a sema- group branch in cologne (d), and stc technology in newcastle-under-lyme (gb).  arcadia consortium