Industrial Maintenance Modelled in SOCCA: an Experience Report

A large industrial process, software maintenance, has been modelled by using the process modelling language SOCCA. The paper reports about the experiences with this trial. In particular, feasibility, expressiveness, quality, and the overall benefits of a formal SOCCA model are discussed and compared to the formerly existing informal process description. In order to illustrate the results, a well chosen process model fragment from the larger model is outlined in detail. It addresses in particular the human-intensive cooperation within the process and shows the seamless combination of technical components and human agent components in the SOCCA model. The main conclusions from this trial are that formal SOCCA models are suited to model realistic industrial processes and that due to an intrinsic modular structure of a SOCCA model even huge models remain reasonably readable and understandable.