M. Spivey. The Z Notation (second edition). Prentice Hall International: Hemel Hempstead, England, 1992.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....[46, 58] it is still the case that most new formal models do not even outline their role in system design and implementation. There is a large number of formal techniques and languages available to specify properties of software systems [14] including state based languages such as VDM [33] Z [53] and B [36] processbased languages such as CCS [41] and CSP [28] temporal logics [20] modal logics [10] and Statecharts [55] However, in bringing together the need for formal models on one hand and computational models that relate to software development on the other, we adopt the Z ....

....agent has a model of itself or not is optional. The following definitions provide for a new type, for any existing type, # E d w Gy A;Au[ J R G e J r1c Most other syntactic constructs in this paper are fairly standard but more complete treatments of Z can be found elsewhere [53]. 3 The Agent Framework There are four types upon which all our notions in the SMART (Structured and Modular Agents and Relationship Types) agent framework are based. The definitions within this paper will be built up using only these types; they are declared below. w K L p 1 L ) ....

M. Spivey. The Z Notation (second edition). Prentice Hall International: Hemel Hempstead, England, 1992.

.... as [3, 17] which build upon and extend methodologies and modelling techniques from knowledge engineering, providing formal, compositional modelling languages suitable for the verification of system structure and function, those which take existing formal methods and languages, for example Z [31], and provide definitions within such a framework that support the specification of agents or agent systems [26] and . those which have essentially been developed de novo for particular kinds of agent systems. cassiopeia [7] for example, supports the design of Contract Net [29] based systems ....

M. Spivey, The Z Notation, 2nd ed., Prentice Hall International: Hemel Hempstead, England, 1992.

....the system, for example, the way in which agents form themselves into groups. Collinot et al. illustrate the methodology by way of the design of a RoboCup soccer team (see [38] Luck and d Inverno: Agents in Z Luck and d Inverno have developed an agent specification framework in the Z language [68], although the types of agents considered in this framework are somewhat different from those discussed above [48, 49] They define a four tiered hierarchy of the entities that can exist in an agent based system. They start with entities, which are inanimate objects they have attributes ....

....subsystems are simple enough to be directly implemented. Throughout, we are obliged to demonstrate that each step represents a true refinement of the more abstract specification that preceded it. This demonstration may take the form of a formal proof, if our specification is presented in, say, Z [68] or VDM [42] More usually, justification is by informal argument. Objectoriented analysis and design techniques, which also tend to be structured but informal, are also increasingly playing a role in the development of systems (see, e.g. 6] For functional systems, which simply compute a ....

M. Spivey. The Z Notation (second edition). Prentice Hall International: Hemel Hempstead, England, 1992.

.... as [3, 17] which build upon and extend methodologies and modelling techniques from knowledge engineering, providing formal, compositional modelling languages suitable for the verification of system structure and function, ffl those which take existing formal methods and languages, for example Z [31], and provide definitions within such a framework that support the specification of agents or agent systems [26] and ffl those which have essentially been developed de novo for particular kinds of agent systems. CASSIOPEIA [7] for example, supports the design of Contract Net [29] based systems ....

M. Spivey. The Z Notation (second edition). Prentice Hall International: Hemel Hempstead, England, 1992.

....not in their sequence. We therefore identify a pathway with a set of facts. Similarly, we regard a procedure as a set of pathways, in other words a collection of sets of facts. Let Proc be the set of all procedures. We follow here the notational conventions of the Z specification language [Spi88]. Proc b = PPFact (1) The most trivial procedure of all is the empty set. This offers no pathway at all for managing the patient successfully. We refer to this as STOP . Clearly we would never wish to implement such a useless procedure. STOP b = fg (2) The largest procedure of all is the set ....

Spivey JM. The Z Notation: A Reference Manual. Prentice-Hall International: Hemel Hempstead, 1988.

....by Rao [ Rao, 1996 ] AgentSpeak(L) is a programming language based on an abstraction of the PRS architecture; irrelevant implementation detail is removed, and PRS is stripped to its bare essentials. Building on this work, d Inverno and Luck have constructed a formal specification (in Z [ Spivey, 1992b ] of AgentSpeak(L) d Inverno and Luck, Forthcoming ] This specification reformalises Rao s original description so that it is couched in terms of state and operations on state that can be easily refined into an implemented system. In addition, being based on a simplified version of dMARS, ....

....the contribution made by this specification, its relation to previous work, and prospects for the future. Beliefs Goals Plan Library Interpreter Intentions Sensor Input Action Output Figure 1: A BDI Agent Architecture: PRS Notation The specification below is presented using the Z language [ Spivey, 1992b ] Z is a modeloriented formal specification language based on set theory and first order logic. The key components of a Z specification are definitions of the state space of a system and the possible operations that transform it from one state to another. Because of space constraints, some ....

M. Spivey. The Z Notation (second edition). Prentice Hall International: Hemel Hempstead, England, 1992.

....sub systems are simple enough to be directly implemented. Throughout, we are obliged to demonstrate that each step represents a true refinement of the more abstract specification that preceded it. This demonstration may take the form of a formal proof, if our specification is presented in, say, Z [60] or VDM [29] More usually, justification is by informal argument. For functional systems, the refinement process is well understood, and comparatively straightforward. Refinement calculi exist, which enable the system developer to take a pre and postcondition specification, and from it ....

M. Spivey. The Z Notation (second edition). Prentice Hall International: Hemel Hempstead, England, 1992.

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M. Spivey. The Z Notation (second edition). Prentice Hall International: Hemel Hempstead, England, 1992.

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