Object-oriented design for the specification of the blood clotting cascade: a class-structured view of bio-computing processes

We describe a very intricate case of interlocked bio-processes: the blood clotting cascade, by using a set of tools from object-oriented design (OOD). Originally, OOD has been designed for the abstract specification of complex software prior to programming. OOD brings a handful of concepts such as modularity, classes, methods and their inheritance hierarchies for concurrent process synchronization and cooperation. It appears that the set of OOD methods can be a very fruitful tool for the abstract description of biological processes apparently quite far away from software engineering. We give a moderately detailed view of the blood clotting cascade using the standard tool of OOD: Unified Modeling Language (UML) and its extension: Real-Time UML.