Genericity in method construction

The new emerging field of the method engineering discipline acknowledges the need for a rapid construction of methods. We propose an approach aiming to fulfil this objective. The approach is based on the assumption that there exists generic method construction knowledge which can be formalised into method construction patterns for further reuse. Under our approach, the construction of a method consists of applying the generic method construction patterns to its product model in order to generate the process model. The paper proposes a set of patterns to cover the various aspects of system engineering, details and exemplifies some of them, and finally validates the patterns against existing methods