M. Fisher. Concurrent METATEM --- A Language for Modeling Reactive Systems. In Parallel Architectures and Languages, Europe (PARLE), Munich, Germany, June 1993. SpringerVerlag.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....formal languages, seems to lead to more encouraging results. Many existing approaches for developing agent based systems are based on logics. Temporal Logic has proven useful for specifying agents which, on the basis of the past, do the future. Concurrent METATEM is an example of this approach [7]. Deontic Logic [14] fits the needs of representing the actions an agent may, may not, or must perform according to some conditions. This allows a quick and high level description of the agents state and behavior. Linear Logic, as discussed in [5, 4] has connectives to express concurrency and ....

M. Fisher. Concurrent METATEM -- A Language for Modeling Reactive Systems. In PARLE'93 Proceedings of Parallel Architectures and languages, Europe. Springer Verlag, 1993. Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

....properties of a program s behavior can be proven in an accompanying temporal logic. Our work has similar objectives, the major difference being that we provide a framework where the programming language and the logic to describe and prove program s properties is the same. Concurrent Metatem [3] is a concurrent programming language in which processes are executable temporal logic specifications. Therefore a single process is declaratively specified. However, the interaction of a system of processes, via broadcast message passing, lacks a similar declarative reading. Linda provides a ....

Fisher M. 1993. Concurrent METATEM - A Language for Modeling Reactive Systems. In Proceedings of Parallel Architectures and Languages Europe, Munich, Germany. June.

....[22, 16] Reactive systems are typically concurrent or distributed, and contain elements that are constantly reacting to stimuli from their environment. In this paper, we provide a semantics for Concurrent METATEM, a language for representing and implementing a subclass of reactive systems [14]. This subclass contains reactive systems that are concurrent and whose elements represent self contained entities that communicate through message passing. These entities encapsulate both data and behaviour and, hence, can be termed objects. Such reactive systems are sometimes termed concurrent ....

....in order to represent some of the extensions described earlier. Finally, in 4, we present our conclusions together with an outline of future work on the semantics of Concurrent METATEM. 2 Concurrent METATEM In this section we give an outline of Concurrent METATEM. The reader is referred to [14, 10] for more details. We begin by motivating and describing the overall computational model, follow this by examining the internal definition and execution of objects within this model, and conclude with a brief discussion of extensions to the basic language. As the internal definition of Concurrent ....

M. Fisher. Concurrent METATEM --- A Language for Modeling Reactive Systems. In Parallel Architectures and Languages, Europe (PARLE), Munich, Germany, June 1993. SpringerVerlag.

....research has considered the important problems of specifying and verifying DAI systems. In short, the purpose of this paper is to address these issues: we present preliminary results on specifying and verifying systems implemented using Concurrent MetateM, a novel new programming language for DAI [14, 13, 16]. A Concurrent MetateM system contains a number of concurrently executing objects, which are able to communicate via message passing; each object executes a temporal logic specification representing its desired behaviour. In this paper, we describe Concurrent MetateM in more detail, and then ....

....behaviour. The move from specification to implementation in Concurrent MetateM is therefore a small one (since the specification and implementation languages have much in common) However, standard temporal logic cannot simply be used to describe Concurrent MetateM systems (although see [13] for a semantics of Concurrent MetateM based on dense temporal logic [5] This is because each object in a Concurrent MetateM system is a symbolic AI system in its own right: it contains a set of explicitly represented (temporal logic) formulae which it manipulates in order to decide what to do. ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

M. Fisher. Concurrent MetateM --- A Language for Modeling Reactive Systems. In Parallel Architectures and Languages, Europe (PARLE), Munich, Germany, June 1993. Springer-Verlag.

....however, we believe that the implementation of our approach would be feasible. 5. 4 Sequential Implementation We have developed a very simple prototype implementation of the propositional framework described above using CONCURRENT METATEM, a language based upon the execution of temporal formulae [8]. The model of computation in CONCURRENT METATEM is exactly that described in 2, so in order to implement the system we need only code the deduction mechanism as temporal formulae. We will not describe this implementation here (see [6] for details) but merely note that there is a simple and ....

....provides additional motivation for our approach. We will only provide a brief description of these attributes but, as the techniques for structuring objects described here relate closely to our work in using CONCURRENT METATEM to represent and control multi agent systems, the reader is directed to [8, 7] for further details. Note, however, that the following sections contain only initial ideas. As yet, none of these have been implemented in a large scale theorem proving system. 6.1 Alternative Proof Mechanisms We have described a framework for concurrent theorem proving where each object ....

M. Fisher. Concurrent METATEM --- A Language for Modeling Reactive Systems. In Parallel Architectures and Languages, Europe (PARLE), Munich, Germany, June 1993. Springer-Verlag.

....honesty, commitments, and conventions may well play an important role in systems which are capable of such behaviour [11] situation [10] and makes the formal proof of properties very difficult. To address these issues, we have developed a DAI programming language called CONCURRENT METATEM [5]. A CONCURRENT METATEM system contains a number of concurrently executing objects, able to communicate through asynchronous broadcast message passing. Each object is programmed by giving it a temporal logic specification of the behaviour that it is intended the object should exhibit. Objects ....

....we hope to illustrate and justify these claims. We begin, in 2, with an overview of the CONCURRENT METATEM language (note that this paper does not aim to give a complete introduction either to CONCURRENT METATEM or its underlying temporal logic; for such introductions, the reader is referred to [1, 5, 7]) In 3, we introduce a cooperative protocol, based on the Contract Net [12] which we formalise by expressing it in the CONCURRENT METATEM language. This formalisation serves as an executable specification of the protocol. In 4, we show how the properties of the protocol may be derived through ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

M. Fisher. Concurrent METATEM --- A Language for Modeling Reactive Systems. In Parallel Architectures and Languages, Europe (PARLE), Munich, Germany, June 1993. Springer-Verlag.

....language could be applied. We present a variety of sample applications, highlighting the particular features of Concurrent METATEM that we believe will make it appropriate for use in these areas. 1 Introduction Concurrent METATEM is a language based upon the direct execution of temporal formulae [15]. It consists of two distinct aspects: an execution mechanism for temporal formulae in a particular form; and an operational model that treats single executable temporal logic programs as asynchronously executing objects in a concurrent objectbased system. The motivation for the development of ....

.... of temporal logic programs provided by METATEM, an executable temporal logic described in [3, 10] The rules that are executed are based upon the normal form developed for temporal theoremproving [14] while the concurrent operational model was outlined in [9] and developed to its current state in [15]. 2.1 An Overview of the Approach While it is possible to program objects in Concurrent METATEM using a small range of temporal operators (just the last time and sometime in the future operators) a large range of temporal operators are available in the interests of convenience. Most of these ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

M. Fisher. Concurrent METATEM --- A Language for Modeling Reactive Systems. In Parallel Architectures and Languages, Europe (PARLE), Munich, Germany, June 1993.

....research has considered the important problems of specifying and verifying DAI systems. In short, the purpose of this paper is to address these issues: we present preliminary results on specifying and verifying systems implemented using Concurrent METATEM, a novel new programming language for DAI [14, 13, 16]. A Concurrent METATEM system contains a number of concurrently executing objects, which are able to communicate via message passing; each object executes a temporal logic specification representing its desired behaviour. In this paper, we describe Concurrent METATEM in more detail, and then ....

....behaviour. The move from specification to implementation in Concurrent METATEM is therefore a small one (since the specification and implementation languages have much in common) However, standard temporal logic cannot simply be used to describe Concurrent METATEM systems (although see [13] for a semantics of Concurrent METATEM based on dense temporal logic [5] This is because each object in a Concurrent METATEM system is a symbolic AI system in its own right: it contains a set of explicitly represented (temporal logic) formulae which it manipulates in order to decide what to do. ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

M. Fisher. Concurrent METATEM --- A Language for Modeling Reactive Systems. In Parallel Architectures and Languages, Europe (PARLE), Munich, Germany, June 1993. SpringerVerlag.

....are generally not represented explicitly. This makes it difficult to understand or predict how the system will behave in a given situation [10] and makes the formal proof of properties very difficult. To address these issues, we have developed a DAI programming language called CONCURRENTMETATEM [5]. A CONCURRENTMETATEM system contains a number of concurrently executing objects, able to communicate through asynchronous broadcast message passing. Each object is programmed by giving it a temporal logic specification of the behaviour that it is intended the object should exhibit. Objects ....

....we hope to illustrate and justify these claims. We begin, in 2, with an overview of the CONCURRENT METATEM language (note that this paper does not aim to give a complete introduction either to CONCURRENT METATEM or its underlying temporal logic; for such introductions, the reader is referred to [1, 5, 7]) In 3, we introduce a cooperative protocol, based on the Contract Net [12] which we formalise by expressing it in the CONCURRENT METATEM language. This formalisation serves as an executable specification of the protocol. In 4, we show how the properties of the protocol may be derived through ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

M. Fisher. Concurrent METATEM --- A Language for Modeling Reactive Systems. In Parallel Architectures and Languages, Europe (PARLE), Munich, Germany, June 1993. Springer-Verlag.

....This paper describes a novel programming language based upon executable temporal logic, and demonstrates the utility of this language for tackling the problems faced by designers and implementors of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) systems. This language, called Concurrent MetateM [13, 12], incorporates two innovations which together distance it from other DAI programming languages. 1. It is based on the idea of executable temporal logics . In common with other, more traditional logic programming languages, e.g. Prolog) Concurrent MetateM has both a well understood logical ....

....we must first introduce both temporal logic and (non concurrent) MetateM. We will only give a brief introduction to these topics; for more details, see [9] and [14] 2 An alternative, but preliminary, outline is given in [13] while a complete description of Concurrent MetateM can be found in [12]. 2.1 Temporal Logic Throughout this paper we use a discrete, linear temporal logic, called First order MetateM Logic (FML) a complete definition of FML can be found in [14] This logic introduces several new connectives to classical logic to enable us to reason about the time dependent ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

M. Fisher. Concurrent MetateM --- A Language for Modeling Reactive Systems. In Parallel Architectures and Languages, Europe (PARLE), Munich, Germany, June 1993. Springer-Verlag.

....collaborators interested in developing reusable libraries. Although it is implemented in Pop 11 the main ideas could be implemented in another AI language, such as Lisp, and if that were done it would be possible to develop common high level libraries. Concurrent METATEM Concurrent METATEM [2] is a dynamic (temporal logic is used to represent individual agent behaviours) open (broadcast message passing is central and replication is achieved via cloning) flexible (asynchronous concurrency, asynchronous messagepassing and structuring of agent space via groups) and simple (that s all ....

M. Fisher. Concurrent METATEM --- A Language for Modeling Reactive Systems. In Proceedings of Parallel Architectures and Languages, Europe (PARLE), Munich, Germany, June 1993. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag.

....This paper describes a novel programming language based upon executable temporal logic, and demonstrates the utility of this language for tackling the problems faced by designers and implementors of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) systems. This language, called Concurrent METATEM [13, 12], incorporates two innovations which together distance it from other DAI programming languages. 1. It is based on the idea of executable temporal logics. In common with other, more traditional logic programming languages, e.g. PROLOG) Concurrent METATEM has both a well understood logical ....

....will consult its interface to see whether the message is one that should be accepted: if it is, then the message is added to the history; otherwise, it is ignored. 2 An alternative, but preliminary, outline is given in [13] while a complete description of Concurrent METATEM can be found in [12]. A more complete description of Concurrent METATEM will now be given; in order to do this, we must first introduce both temporal logic and (non concurrent) METATEM. We will only give a brief introduction to these topics; for more details, see [9] and [14] 2.1 Temporal Logic Throughout this ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

M. Fisher. Concurrent METATEM --- A Language for Modeling Reactive Systems. Submitted to Parallel Architectures and Languages, Europe (PARLE-93), 1992.

Online articles have much greater impact   More about CiteSeer.IST   Add search form to your site   Submit documents   Feedback  

CiteSeer.IST - Copyright Penn State and NEC