Modeling Events and Events of Events in Software Engineering

A model is a simplified representation of portion of reality that hides a system s nonessential characteristics. It provides a means for reducing complexity as well as visualization and communication and a basis for building it. Most models involve graphic languages during many of the software lifecycle phases. A new model, called thinging machine (TM), has recently been developed as an extension of the input-process-output framework. The paper focuses on events in a TM, offering a new perspective that captures a system s dynamic behaviors and a means of diagrammatically modeling events. The event notion is an important factor in giving semantics to specifications and providing a natural way to specify the interfaces and observable behavior of system components. Specifically, five generic TM event processes are analyzed: create, process, receive, release, and transfer. All events can be mapped (or reduced) to the events of these five event processes