Requirements analysis of the VoD application using the tools in TRADE

This report contains a specification of requirements for a video-on-demand (VoD) application developed at Belgacom, used as a trial application in the 2RARE project. The specification contains three parts: an informal specification in natural language; a semiformal specification consisting of a number of diagrams intended to illustrate the informal specification; and a formal specification that makes the requiremants on the desired software system precise. The informal specification is structured in such a way that it resembles official specification documents conforming to standards such as that of IEEE or ESA. The semiformal specification uses some of the tools in from a requirements engineering toolkit called TRADE (Toolkit for Requirements And Design Engineering). The purpose of TRADE is to combine the best ideas in current structured and object-oriented analysis and design methods within a traditional systems engineering framework. In the case of the VoD system, the systems engineering framework is useful because it provides techniques for allocation and flowdown of system functions to components. TRADE consists of semiformal techniques taken from structured and object-oriented analysis as well as a formal specification langyage, which provides constructs that correspond to the semiformal constructs. The formal specification used in TRADE is LCM (Language for Conceptual Modeling), which is a syntactically sugared version of order-sorted dynamic logic with equality. The purpose of this report is to illustrate and validate the TRADE/LCM approach in the specification of distributed, communication-intensive systems

A Linear-Time Branching-Time Spectrum for Behavioral Specification Theories

We propose behavioral specification theories for most equivalences in the linear-time--branching-time spectrum. Almost all previous work on specification theories focuses on bisimilarity, but there is a clear interest in specification theories for other preorders and equivalences. We show that specification theories for preorders cannot exist and develop a general scheme which allows us to define behavioral specification theories, based on disjunctive modal transition systems, for most equivalences in the linear-time--branching-time spectrum

From SMART to agent systems development

In order for agent-oriented software engineering to prove effective it must use principled notions of agents and enabling specification and reasoning, while still considering routes to practical implementation. This paper deals with the issue of individual agent specification and construction, departing from the conceptual basis provided by the SMART agent framework. SMART offers a descriptive specification of an agent architecture but omits consideration of issues relating to construction and control. In response, we introduce two new views to complement SMART: a behavioural specification and a structural specification which, together, determine the components that make up an agent, and how they operate. In this way, we move from abstract agent system specification to practical implementation. These three aspects are combined to create an agent construction model, actSMART, which is then used to define the AgentSpeak(L) architecture in order to illustrate the application of actSMART

An ANOVA method of evaluating the specification uncertainty in roughness measurement

The specifications of roughness used in industry are normally incomplete, and the incompleteness can induce a significant uncertainty, called specification uncertainty. It’s important to know the magnitude and effect of this uncertainty, but there are yet no standard methods of evaluating the specification uncertainty. In this paper, we propose an ANOVA method to estimate the specification uncertainty. In this method, ANOVA is used to separate specification uncertainty from measurement uncertainty, and the sampling method of GR&R (gauge repeatability and reproducibility) is applied. A case study is given to demonstrate how to use this method to evaluate the specification uncertainty of measuring roughness with PGI (Phase Grating Interferometer) when the filter type is not specified