This volume is a documenlation of I he main results in Ihe research area "Inte
gration of Software Specification Techniques for Applications in Engineering".
On one hand it is based on the Priority Program "Integration von Techniken der
Soflwarespezifikation fur ingenieurwissensehaftliehe Anwendungen", short Soft
Spez, of the German Research Council (DFG). On the other hand it contains new
contributions of international experts in this research area, some of which were
presented at the third international workshop INT 2(X)4 on "Integration of Spec-
ification Techniques for Applications in Engineering". INT 2004 was launched
as a satellite event of ETAPS in Barcelona, the "European Joint Conferences on
Theory and Practice of Software".
The Priority Program SoftSpez was initialed by W. Brauer, M. Broy,
II. Ehrig, II.J. Kreowski, II. Reichel, and II. Weber concerning different aspects
from computer science, and by E. Schnieder and E. Westkiimper concerning
two main application areas in engineering, namely "Traffic Control Systems"
and "Production Automation". After acceptance of SoftSpez by the German
Research Council for the period of 1998-2004 a call for specific projects within
this priority program was launched, where 11 projects from about 75 project
proposals were accepted for a period of two years. Since 1998 each year the
main research proposals and results of the projects have been presented at an
annual colloquium of the priority program, and every two years Ihe projects
have been evaluated by an independent group of referees appointed by the Ger
man Research Council. At this point we would like to thank A. Engelke and
G. Sonntag, the responsible officers from the DFG, the group of referees, with
chairman W. Brauer, and our colleagues mentioned above for setting up the
initial proposal for SoftSpez.
The cooperation between the projects was organized into different subject
areas, with several meetings since 1999. In addition to the annual colloquia and
the subject area meetings on a national level, also three international workshops
were organized by SoftSpez. The workshops INT 2000, 2002, and 2004 were
launched in cooperation with the ETAPS conferences in order to present the
concepts and results of SoftSpez to the international scientific community and
to get feedback from international experts.
The contributions in this volume are organized according to the six different
subject areas of SoftSpez, where the coordinators for the subject areas are the
coeditors for the corresponding parts of this volume. All papers were carefully
reviewed by national and international experts.
In addition to a general introduction to the research area of this volume
there are also introductions for each subject area. They present an overview and
a short introduction into each paper of the corresponding subject area, including
contributions from the projects of SoftSpez and papers from international (non-
German) experts in this area.