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Towards an Agent-Oriented Framework for Specification of Information Systems

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Formal Models of Agents (ModelAge 1997)

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Abstract

Objects in information systems usually have a very long lifespan. Therefore, it often happens that during the life of an object external requirements are changing, e.g. changes of laws. Such changes often require the object to adopt another behavior. In consequence, it is necessary to get a grasp of dynamically changing object behavior. Unfortunately, not all possible changes can in general be taken into account in advance at specification time. Hence, current object specification approaches cannot deal with this problem. Flexible extensions of object specification are needed to capture such situations.

The approach we present and discuss in this paper is an important step towards a specification framework based on the concept of agents by introducing a certain form of knowledge as part of the internal state of objects. Especially, we concentrate on the specification of evolving temporal behavior. For that, we propose an extension (called Evolving Temporal Logic) of classical temporal logic approaches to object specification.

This research was partially supported by the CEC ESPRIT Basic Research Working Groups No. 8319 ModelAge and No. 22704 ASPIRE as well as by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under Sa 465/19 (SAW).

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Conrad, S., Saake, G., Türker, C. (1999). Towards an Agent-Oriented Framework for Specification of Information Systems. In: Meyer, JJ.C., Schobbens, PY. (eds) Formal Models of Agents. ModelAge 1997. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1760. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46581-2_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46581-2_5

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