James L. Rash

Michael G. Hinchey

Christopher Rouff

Walter F. Truszkowski

Diana Gordon-Spears

The idea of a FAABS workshop was first conceived in 1998 at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, while the Agent Technology Development Group in the Advanced Architectures and Automation Branch (Code 588) was developing a prototype agent community to automate satellite ground operations. While developing this system, several race conditions arose within and between agents. Due to the complexity of the agents and the communications between them, it was decided that a formal approach was needed to specify the agents and the communications between them, so that the system could be checked for additional errors. A formal model of the inter-agent communications was developed, with the expectation that this would enable us to find more errors. Success in this convinced us of the importance of using formal methods to model agent-based systems. To share our own experiences and to learn how others were approaching these issues, we decided to hold a workshop on formal methods and agent-based systems. The response was overwhelming. The result was the first FAABS workshop, which was held at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Posters, paper presentations, panels, and an invited talk by J Moore stimulated much discussion and subsequent collaboration.

Second International Workshop, FAABS 2002, Greenbelt, MD, USA, October 29-31, 2002, Revised Papers

Formal Approaches to Agent-Based Systems

Michael Butler

Maria M. Larrondo-Petrie

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods, ICFEM 2007, held in Boca Raton, Florida, USA, November 14-15, 2007. The 19 revised full papers together with two invited talks presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. The papers address all current issues in formal methods and their applications in software engineering. The papers are organized in topical sections.

9th International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods, ICFEM 2007, Boca Raton, Florida, USA, November 14-15, 2007, Proceedings

Formal Methods and Software Engineering

Christopher A. Rouff

Diana Gordon

Walter Truszkowski

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First International Workshop on Formal Approaches to Agent-Based Systems, FAABS 2000, held in Greenbelt, MD, USA, in April 2000. The 22 revised full papers presented together with 13 posters and two panel discussion reports were carefully reviewed and improved for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on verifying agents' mental states, synthesizing agents initially, frameworks and formalizations, modeling and execution, inter-agent communication, and adaptive agents.

First International Workshop, FAABS 2000 Greenbelt, MD, USA, April 5-7, 2000 Revised Papers

G. Goos

Jonathan P. Bowen

J. Hartmanis

Jan Van Leeuwen

David Till

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference of Z Users, ZUM'97, held in Reading, UK, in April 1997. The volume presents 18 revised full papers together with three invited presentations by internationally leading experts. The papers are organized into topical sections on real-time systems, tools, logic, system development, reactive systems, refinement, and applications. Also a select Z bibliography by Jonathan Bowen is added. All in all, the book competently reports the state-of-the-art in research and advanced applications of the Z notation.

10th International Conference of Z Users, Reading, UK, April, 3-4, 1997, Proceedings

ZUM'97: The Z Formal Specification Notation

Errata, detected in Taylor's Logarithms. London: 4to, 1792. [sic] 14.18.3 6 Kk Co-sine of 3398 3298 - Nautical Almanac (1832) In the list of ERRATA detected in Taylor's Logarithms, for cos. 4° 18'3", read cos. 14° 18'2". - Nautical Almanac (1833) ERRATUM ofthe ERRATUM ofthe ERRATA of TAYLOR'S Logarithms. For cos. 4° 18'3", read cos. 14° 18' 3". - Nautical Almanac (1836) In the 1820s, an Englishman named Charles Babbage designed and partly built a calculating machine originally intended for use in deriving and printing logarithmic and other tables used in the shipping industry. At that time, such tables were often inaccurate, copied carelessly, and had been instrumental in causing a number of maritime disasters. Babbage's machine, called a 'Difference Engine' because it performed its cal culations using the principle of partial differences, was intended to substantially reduce the number of errors made by humans calculating the tables. Babbage had also designed (but never built) a forerunner of the modern printer, which would also reduce the number of errors admitted during the transcription of the results. Nowadays, a system implemented to perform the function of Babbage's engine would be classed as safety-critical. That is, the failure of the system to produce correct results could result in the loss of human life, mass destruction of property (in the form of ships and cargo) as well as financial losses and loss of competitive advantage for the shipping firm.

High-Integrity System Specification and Design

Industrial Strength Formal Methods in Practice provides hands-on experience and guidance for anyone who needs to apply formal methods successfully in an industrial context. Each chapter is written by an expert in software engineering or formal methods, and contains background information, introductions to the techniques being used, actual fragments of formalised components, details of results and an analysis of the overall approach. It provides specific details on how to produce high-quality software that comes in on-time and within budget. Aimed mainly at practitioners in software engineering and formal methods, this book will also be of interest to the following groups; academic researchers working in formal methods who are interested in evidence of their success and in how they can be applied on an industrial scale, and students on advanced software engineering courses who need real-life specifications and examples on which to base their work.

Industrial-Strength Formal Methods in Practice

Walt Truszkowski

Patricia Rago

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts, WRAC 2005, held in Greenbelt, MD, USA in September 2005. The 27 full papers presented are fully revised to incorporate reviewers' comments and discussions at the workshop. Topics addressed are social aspects of agents, agent architectures, autonomic systems, agent communities, and agent intelligence.

Second International Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts, WRAC 2005, Greenbelt, MD, USA, September 20-22, 2005, Revised Papers

Innovative Concepts for Autonomic and Agent-Based Systems

Michael G. Hinchey

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