FMC is the acronym for the Fundamental Modelling Concepts, primarily a consistent and coherent way to think and talk about dynamic systems. It enables people to communicate the concepts and structures of complex informational systems in an efficient way among the different types of stakeholders. A universal notation, easy to learn and easy to apply, which originates from existing standards, is defined to visualize the structures to communicate in a coherent way. In contrast to most of the visualization and modeling standards of today, it focuses on human comprehension of complex systems on all levels of abstraction by clearly separating conceptual structures from implementation structures. FMC is based on strong theoretical foundations, has successfully been applied to real-life systems in practice (at SAP, Siemens, Alcatel etc.) and also is being taught in software engineering courses at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute of Software Systems Engineering.
This quick introduction will give you an idea of what FMC is all about by presenting you the key concepts starting with a small but smart example. Following the example, you will learn about FMC's theoretical background, the notation and hopefully get a feeling about the way FMC helps to communicate about complex systems. At the first glance, you might find the example even trivial, but keep in mind that this little example presented here may be the top-level view of a system being realized by a network of hundreds of humans and computers running a software built from millions of lines of codes. It would hardly be possible to efficiently develop such a system without efficient ways to communicate about it.
The example describes different aspects of a travel agency system. Starting with a top level description of the system, we will shift our focus toward implementation, while still remaining independent from any concrete software structures. So don't expect to see UML class diagrams, which doubtless might be helpful to represent the low-level structures of software systems.
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Apache Modeling Portal 2004-10-29 |