Leiden University

Institute Name: Leiden University, Department of Computer Science

Description: Leiden University is the oldest university in the Netherlands. It was founded in 1575. Currently, it has approximately 17,500 students, and a staff of nearly 5,000 employees. Its Computer Science Department is a comparatively small, but nevertheless effective, working subunit within the whole university. It has about 30 employees, working in five different research groups. These groups participate into several European ESPRIT and TEMPUS projects, such as Caliban, COMPUGRAPH, Asmics, APPARC, and PROMOTER. In addition, they are heavily involved in managing research activities of several international organizations like EATCS, IFIP. The Software Engineering and Information Systems groups of the department will contribute to this project. They consist of six senior and four junior researchers, doing research in (semi-)formal specification techniques, specification transformation techniques, and designing and developing corresponding support tools. The investigated specification formalisms range from operational techniques based on graph replacement systems and functional specifications or state transition systems to descriptive techniques known from semantical data modeling.

Many research activities within the research group are related to the development of the specification formalism and technique SOCCA (Specification of Coordinated and Cooperative Activities). SOCCA is a high-level, visual, object-oriented specification formalism, which particularly supports the specification of coordinated behaviour of human and non-human agents within a distributed, concurrent, multi-agent system. SOCCA is currently applied within the ESPRIT project PROMOTER (Process Modeling Techniques: Basic Research) to specify software development processes. The research is carried out in close cooperation with other European research groups as well as with several Dutch companies or research institutes (e.g. TNO Delft, Philips, KSEPL, PTT, GAK).

Researchers associated with the project:

Prof. Dr. G. Engels Dr. K. Anzenhofer Dr. L.P.J. Groenewegen

Brief CVs of Key Researchers:

Name: Prof. Dr. Gregor Engels

Nationality: German

Academic Qualifications & Experience: Gregor Engels received his PhD. in computer science at the University of Osnabrueck (Germany) in 1986. His PhD. thesis focussed on the design and implementation of a programming support environment and, in particular, on the specification of internal document representations by a graph-grammar based specification language. Between 1987 and 1991 he was working as an associate professor at the Braunschweig Technical University (Germany), where he was the leader of the research project CADDY. CADDY was concerned with the development of an integrated environment for conceptual database design. Since 1991 he has been a full professor for Software Engineering and Information Systems at Leiden University (The Netherlands) and currently he is the head of the Department of Computer Science. His research interests are (semi-)formal specification languages, development methods and support tools. Together with other members of his group, he is involved in the ESPRIT projects PROMOTER (Process Modeling Techniques: Basic Research) and COMPUGRAPH (Computing by Graph Transformations).

Selected Publications:

G. Engels, M. Gogolla, U. Hohenstein, K. Huelsmann, P. Loehr-Richter, G. Saake, H.D. Ehrich.(1992): Conceptual Modelling of Database Applications Using an Extended ER Model. Data & Knowledge Engineering, North-Holland, Vol. 9, pp. 157-204

G. Engels, L.P.J. Groenewegen.(1994): SOCCA: Specifications of Coordinated and Cooperative Activities. In A. Finkelstein, J. Kramer, B.A. Nuseibeh (eds.): Software Process Modelling and Technology, Research Studies Press, Taunton, pp. 71-102

J. Ebert, G. Engels.(1994): Structural and Behavioural Views on OMT-Classes. In E. Bertino, S. Urban (eds.): Proceedings International Symposium on Object-Oriented Methodologies and Systems (ISOOMS), Palermo, Italy, September 21-22, 1994, LNCS 858, Springer, Berlin, pp. 142-157

G. Engels, G. Kappel.(1994): Object-Oriented System Development: Will the New Approach Solve Old Problems. In K. Duncan, K. Krueger (eds.): Proceedings of the IFIP Congress 94 - Vol. 3, Hamburg, Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam, pp. 434-441

Contact Details:

Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Gregor Engels,

Address:Department of Computer Science, Leiden University, 1 Niels Bohrweg Str., PO Box 9512, Leiden, NL-2300 RA, THE NETHERLANDS

Telephone number: +31 71 277069

Telefax number: +31-71-276985

EMail: engels@wi.leidenuniv.nl

List of Members