An Overview of The Mensurae Language: Specifying Business Processes

We describe a language which can be used to model business processes (both technical and nontechnical). It has a formal semantics, so as to enable formal analysis and prediction on the basis of the models, and i s based on principles of measurement theory, so as to enable the application of engineering and scientific principles to metricate the business processes. The language models products and processes as the constituents of business processes and uses a control construct, gates, to enable product and process composition. The semantics of the language is based on timed transition systems and processes can be specified using a combined temporal and modal logic with real-time operators. The language thus obtained i s also relevant to modelling threads of execution in object oriented systems and may lead to appropriate constructs for defining timed, concurrent, and synchronised computations over object oriented structures.