Modelling and formally specifying agent knowledge required to deal with limited access to resources in a multi-agent situation, is the focus of this paper. Not only the static elements involved but also the dynamic element, namely the behaviour of the system, is explicitly modelled and specified. DESIRE, a formal framework for the design and specification of compositional architectures, is empl...

Modelling and formally specifying agent knowledge required to deal with limited access to resources in a multi-agent situation, is the focus of this paper. Not only the static elements involved but also the dynamic elements, namely the behaviour of the system, is explicitly modelled and specified. It will be shown how this results in a flexible, compositional specification that is applicable to...

Object-Based Graph Grammars (OBGG) is a formal specification language suitable for modeling concurrent object-based systems. On previous work we have mainly discussed the language along with case studies and analysis techniques (model checking and simulation) for systems described in OBGG. In this paper we present the set of tools we have developed and/or integrated to build an environment for ...

Modelling and formally specifying agent knowledge required to deal with limited access to resources in a multi-agent situation, is the focus of this paper. Not only the static elements involved but also the dynamic element, namely the behaviour of the system, is explicitly modelled and specified. It will be shown how this results in a flexible, compositional specification that is applicable to ...

An open collaborative effort has been initiated: to design a common framework for algebraic specification and development of software. The rationale behind this initiative is that the lack of such a common framework greatly hinders the dissemination and application of research results in algebraic specification. In particular, the proliferation of specification languages, some differing in only...

The necessity of a methodology for developing multi-agent systems (MAS) has been widely recognized due to the difficulties in analysis, specification, design, implementation and testing the autonomous and collaborative behaviours of such systems. This paper presents CAMLE – a caste-centric agent modeling language and environment. The methodology underlying the language and environment is based ...

Formal specifications are widely used in the development of safety critical systems, as the Sensor Voting Module of the Landing Gear System. However, the conformance relationship between the formal specification and the concrete implementation must be checked. In this paper, we show a technique to formally link a Java class with its Abstract State Machine formal specification, and two approache...

One of the most appealing features of multiagent technology is its natural way to modularise a complex system in terms of multiple, interacting and autonomous components. As a natural extension of classes, castes introduced in the formal specification language SLAB provide a language facility that provides modularity in the formal specification of multiagent systems. A caste represents a set of...

The development of formal specifications may benefit from prototyping activities. The production of an executable model for a given description helps bridging the gap between this specification and the corresponding reality. The KIDS/VDM system, based on the KIDS environment, provides these prototyping facilities for the model-based specification language of VDM. This paper illustrates its use ...