Object Process Methodology: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 04:16, 11 September 2020

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In OPM, an ''object'' is a thing that exists, or might exist, physically or informatically. Objects are [[stateful]]—they may have states, such that at each point in time, the object is at one of its states or in transition between states. A ''process'' is a thing that transforms an object by creating or consuming it, or by changing its state.

OPM is bimodal; it is expressed both visually/graphically in Object-Process Diagrams (OPD) and verbally/textually in Object-Process Language (OPL), a set of automatically- generated sentences in a subset of English. A patented software package called OPCAT, for generating OPD and OPL, is freely available.<ref name="OPCAT">{{cite web |url=http://esml.iem.technion.ac.il/opcat-installation/ |title=Enterprise Systems Modeling Laboratory » OPCAT installation |website=technion.ac.il |accessdate=3 May 2017}}</ref>

==History==

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; Object Process Diagram (OPD)

OPD is the one and only kind of diagram of OPM. This uniqueness of diagram kind is a major contributor to OPM's simplicity, and it is in sharp contrast to UML, which has 14 kinds of diagrams, and to SysML, which has nine such kinds.<ref name="SysMLvsOPM">{{cite book |last1=Grobshtein |first1=Yariv |last2=Perelman |first2=Valeriya |last3=Safra |first3=Eliyahu |last4=Dori |first4=Dov |title=Systems Modeling Languages: OPM Versus SysML |date=2007 |publisher=IEEE |___location=Haifa, Israel |isbn=978-1-4244-0770-5 |pages=102–109 |url=https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/424372 |accessdate=15 November 2018 |ref=SysMLvsOPM}}</ref> An OPD graphically describes objects, processes and links among them. Links can be structural and procedural. Structural links connect objects to objects or processes to processes, expressing the static system aspect—how the system is structured. Procedural links connect objects to processes, expressing the dynamic system aspect—how the system changes over time. The entire system is represented by a set of hierarchically- organized OPDs, such that the root OPD, called the systems diagram (SD), specifies the "bird's eye" view of the system, and lower-level OPDs specify the system in increasing levels of detail. All the OPDs in the system's OPD set are "aware" of each other, with each showing the system, or part of it, at some level of detail. The entire system is specified in its entirety by the union of the details (model facts) appearing in all the OPDs.

; Object Process Language (OPL)

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; State expression and state suppression

[[File:State OPM.png|thumb|upright=1.5|A stateful object with all its five states expressed (left) and a suppressed version (right), in which only the relevant subset of states are left while the rest are replaced by the ellipsis (…...) state]]

OPM shall provide an option for state suppression, i.e., suppressing the appearance of some or all the states

within an object as represented in a particular OPD when those states are not necessary in that OPD's context.