Formal specifications for a project management approach

In the context of a management by projects approach this paper focuses on formal specifications. The project approach we propose is based on three main concepts. The first is the global project framework with the project and objective definition, the project life cycle and the different steps to carry out with the possibility of defining recursive projects. The second concept concerns the formal project specification through means of transition graphs, which are a generalisation of finite state automata, and algebraic specifications of abstract data types which allow us to verify the coherence of our model. The organizational issues are handled by the last concept which is the exchange relationship between the use and the realisation roles typically taken over by the project manager and its team. The project model we propose follows on the one hand a clearly defined life cycle, but is, at the same time, modular and flexible due to the concepts of recursivity (a project might replace any project stage at any moment) and role (the agents who actually will take over the defined roles have to be found dynamically for example by contract net protocols)