Thing Theory: Connecting Humans to Smart Healthcare

Healthcare providers will enter location-aware smart environments with the expectation that their devices will integrate, their location will be incorporated, and the environment that they are within will specifically respond to their needs, as well as to the needs of their patients. Cooperation and coordination in complex environments requires people to have access to appropriate contextually sensitive information, some of which must be shared between them. To plan and design effective location-aware smart environments for healthcare, tools are required for integrating and responding to human needs and anticipating human intents and desires. A location-aware healthcare smart environment is another layer within this already highly heterogeneous system of communication. Each component in a location-aware smart environment network can generate data and send messages that must be processed, understood and responded to in some manner. In a healthcare environment, well placed software agents can help manage critical messages shared between sensors, low level software agents and the people who act on this information, improving care for patients and outcomes for providers. The authors’ propose a framework based on the agency of both humans and environmental components: Thing Theory, a logic-based agent framework that evolves discussion on how to connect humans to a healthcare environment designed to function for their benefit

Challenges in the specification of full contracts

Partially supported by the Nordunet3 project “COSoDIS”.The complete specification of full contracts - contracts which include tolerated exceptions, and which enable reasoning about the contracts themselves, can be achieved using a combination of temporal and deontic concepts. In this paper we discuss the challenges in combining deontic and other relevant logics, in particular focusing on operators for choice, obligations over sequences, contrary-to-duty obligations, and how internal and external decisions may be incorporated in an action-based language for specifying contracts. We provide different viable interpretations and approaches for the development of such a sound logic and outline challenges for the future.peer-reviewe

Improvement and Analysis of behavioural models with variability

Product Lines or Families represent a new paradigm widely used to describe company products with similar functionality and requirements in order to improve efficiency and productivity of a company. In this context many studies are focused on the research of the best behavioural model useful to describe a product family and to reason about properties of the family itself. In addition the model must allow to describe in a simple way different types of variability, needed to characterize several products of the family. One of the most important of these models is the Modal Transition System (MTS), an extension of a Labelled Transition System (LTS), which introduces two types of transitions useful to describe the necessary and allowed requirements. These models have been broadly studied and several its extensions have been described. These extensions follow different approaches which entail the introduction of more and more complex and expressive requirements. Furthermore MTS and its extensions define a concept of refinement which represents a step of design process, namely a step where some allowed requirements are discarded and other ones become necessary. In this thesis we introduce a new model, the Constrained Modal Transition System (CMTS ), which is a particular and more expressive extension of MTS. Moreover we study different and useful properties correlated to the CMTS. Also, we use CMTS as an useful tool to determine and to define a a hierarchy of expressivity of the known extensions with variability of LTSs and MTSs. In order to check different properties of a product family, we introduce a new deontic-temporal logic based on CTL* interpreted over CMTSs able to express classical safety and liveness properties as well as concepts like obligatory, permission and prohibition. Finally some useful optimizations are introduced to guarantee a less expensive verification from complexity point of view