procedeul

Procedeul is a term used in theoretical discussions of procedural knowledge representation to denote a modular unit that encodes a sequence of actions, conditions, and outcomes. It is intended to support reuse and composability of procedures across software systems, robotics, and educational tools.

The term is a neologism that emerged in the 2010s within niche literature on knowledge representation and workflow design. It does not have a formally standardized definition, and usage varies among researchers. In common practice, a procedeul is described as a self-contained unit with a title, description, inputs, outputs, preconditions, postconditions, a list of steps or subprocedeuls, and a control-flow specification (for example, serial, conditional, or looping). It is designed to be executable by machines, while remaining interpretable by humans.

Applications include software engineering for modular procedure design, industrial robotics for task planning, business process management, and educational technology for teaching procedural skills. A typical example is a procedeul that models “schedule meeting”: preconditions such as “user authenticated,” steps like “check calendar,” “propose times,” “confirm selection,” and postconditions such as “meeting created and notification sent.”

Critics note that the lack of standardization can hinder interoperability with existing process models and scripts. Proponents argue that it clarifies modular design and supports reuse in heterogeneous systems.

See also: procedural generation, workflow, process modeling, knowledge representation.