9,838 research outputs found
Designing community care systems with AUML
This paper describes an approach to developing an appropriate agent environment appropriate for use in community care applications. Key to its success is that software designers collaborate with environment builders to provide the levels of cooperation and support required within an integrated agentâoriented community system. Agent-oriented Unified Modeling Language (AUML) is a practical approach to the analysis, design, implementation and management of such an agent-based system, whilst providing the power and expressiveness necessary to support the specification, design and organization of a health care service. The background of an agent-based community care application to support the elderly is described. Our approach to building agentâoriented software development solutions emphasizes the importance of AUML as a fundamental initial step in producing more general agentâbased architectures. This approach aims to present an effective methodology for an agent software development process using a service oriented approach, by addressing the agent decomposition, abstraction, and organization characteristics, whilst reducing its complexity by exploiting AUMLâs productivity potential. </p
WESTT (Workload, Error, Situational Awareness, Time and Teamwork): An analytical prototyping system for command and control
Modern developments in the use of information technology within command and control allow unprecedented scope for flexibility in the way teams deal with tasks. These developments, together with the increased recognition of the importance of knowledge management within teams present difficulties for the analyst in terms of evaluating the impacts of changes to task composition or team membership. In this paper an approach to this problem is presented that represents team behaviour in terms of three linked networks (representing task, social network structure and knowledge) within the integrative WESTT software tool. In addition, by automating analyses of workload and error based on the same data that generate the networks, WESTT allows the user to engage in the process of rapid and iterative âanalytical prototypingâ. For purposes of illustration an example of the use of this technique with regard to a simple tactical vignette is presented
Generic unified modelling process for developing semantically rich, dynamic and temporal models
Models play a vital role in supporting a range of activities in numerous domains. We rely on models to support the design, visualisation, analysis and representation of parts of the world around us, and as such significant research effort has been invested into numerous areas of modelling; including support for model semantics, dynamic states and behaviour, temporal data storage and visualisation. Whilst these efforts have increased our capabilities and allowed us to create increasingly powerful software-based models, the process of developing models, supporting tools and /or data structures remains difficult, expensive and error-prone. In this paper we define from literature the key factors in assessing a modelâs quality and usefulness: semantic richness, support for dynamic states and object behaviour, temporal data storage and visualisation. We also identify a number of shortcomings in both existing modelling standards and model development processes and propose a unified generic process to guide users through the development of semantically rich, dynamic and temporal models
Clafer: Lightweight Modeling of Structure, Behaviour, and Variability
Embedded software is growing fast in size and complexity, leading to intimate
mixture of complex architectures and complex control. Consequently, software
specification requires modeling both structures and behaviour of systems.
Unfortunately, existing languages do not integrate these aspects well, usually
prioritizing one of them. It is common to develop a separate language for each
of these facets. In this paper, we contribute Clafer: a small language that
attempts to tackle this challenge. It combines rich structural modeling with
state of the art behavioural formalisms. We are not aware of any other modeling
language that seamlessly combines these facets common to system and software
modeling. We show how Clafer, in a single unified syntax and semantics, allows
capturing feature models (variability), component models, discrete control
models (automata) and variability encompassing all these aspects. The language
is built on top of first order logic with quantifiers over basic entities (for
modeling structures) combined with linear temporal logic (for modeling
behaviour). On top of this semantic foundation we build a simple but expressive
syntax, enriched with carefully selected syntactic expansions that cover
hierarchical modeling, associations, automata, scenarios, and Dwyer's property
patterns. We evaluate Clafer using a power window case study, and comparing it
against other notations that substantially overlap with its scope (SysML, AADL,
Temporal OCL and Live Sequence Charts), discussing benefits and perils of using
a single notation for the purpose
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