Herbert Simon has commented on my article, to which I have been asked to respond. This sequence of events is slightly misleading: It suggests the familiar article-critique-rebuttal pattern, whereas I believe that, in fact, Simon and I are in substantial agreement about the nature of causation and its formal model. A few points of disagreement do remain, though, and my purpose in these remarks w...

Most formal approaches to argumentative reasoning focus on the analysis of qualitative aspects. An exeption is the framework of probabilistic argumentation systems. Its philosophy is to include both qualitative and quantitative aspects of argumentation through a simple way of combining logic and probability theory. Probabilities are used to weigh arguments for and against a particular conclusio...

This document describes the research projects of the Formal Methods and Tools re

2 Abstract. Research on the use of mathematical, logical, and formal methods, has been central to Information Retrieval research for long time. Research in this area is important not only because it helps enhancing retrieval effectiveness, but also because it helps clarifying the underlying concepts of Information Retrieval. In this article we outline some of the major aspects of the subject, a...

The formal development method of VSE (Veriication Support Environment) for state-based systems is based on a variant of TLA. VSE supports structured speciications, modular reenements, and also modular proofs. There are applications where one wants (or has) to consider an indeenite number of processes or even processes that are created and deleted dynamically. The general problem that arises in ...

Although recent work has developed systematic procedures and formal methods to help identify unsafe control actions for Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) Step 1, the identification of causal factors in STPA Step 2 has received less attention. This research develops additional guidance and procedures that can be used to identify causal factors and build scenarios in STPA Step 2.

One of the main challenges of information technology is the development of heterogeneous systems consisting of digital and analogue parts. In this paper a technique for the common modelling of the diierent system parts and their interfaces is shown that allows to develop all parts of the system in a consistent manner. This technique is based on extensions of predi-cate/transition nets. Based on...

We study a generalized form of planning under partial observability, in which we have multiple, possibly infinitely many, planning domains with the same actions and observations, and goals expressed over observations, which are possibly temporally extended. By building on work on two-player (nonprobabilistic) games with imperfect information in the Formal Methods literature, we devise a general...