The role of states and transitions in IT-supported, interactive, regulation based services

Abstract

The theory and engineering of states and transitions has been developed since WWII, with considerable success. Since 2012 some Dutch government services organizations, academia and innovative companies decided to establish a co-creation, named Blue Chamber, with the aim to develop a national protocol to “translate the regulations” into a durable, IT-independent model or specifications for IT-supported, interactive, regulation based services. Regulation here means the union of laws, associated decrees and policies, both government and ministerial. Such a protocol acts like a process and each process requires a conceptual data structure or IT-independent reference model. During the analysis of the deep structure of regulations and the associated services it became clear that the theory and application of states and transitions could be applied as innovative tool in the process of specifying the durable specifications. In this paper we describe this approach using a small but significant law and associated services.