Conversations are sequences of messages exchanged among interacting agents. For conversations to be meaningful, agents ought to follow commonly known specifications limiting the types of messages that can be exchanged at any point in the conversation. These specifications are usually implemented using conversation policies (which are rules of inference) or conversation protocols (which are pred...

We outline elements of the Abstract Contract Calculator, a prototype language implemented in Haskell (a declarative programming language) in which we simulate agents executing abstract actions relative to deontic specifications. The deontic specifications are prohibition, permission, and obligation. The concepts of deontic specifications are derived from Standard Deontic Logic and Dynamic Deont...

Increasingly, patients with tuberculosis are receiving clinical care in managed care organizations as a result of enrollment in Medicaid or Medicare, or coverage under privately purchased insurance policies or employee benefit plans. This represents a change from the system that has been in place for decades, where the clinical care and public health functions concerning treatment and control o...

Abstract. Design by Constract (DBC) has influenced the development of formal specification languages that allow the mix of specification and implementation code, like Eiffel, the Java Modeling Language (JML) and Spec#. Meanwhile algebraic specification languages have been developing independently and offer full support for specification and verification of design for large and complex systems i...

Formal Relationships in SequentialObject Systems Eric Kerfoot, St Catherine’s College D.Phil. Thesis, Trinity 2010 Formal specifications describe the behaviour of object-oriented systems precisely, with the intent to capture all properties necessary for correctness. Relationships between objects, and in a broader sense the relationship between whole components, may not be adequately captured by...

We present a framework for merging unit tests autonomous systems. Typically, it is intractable to test an system every scenario in its operating environment. The question of whether possible design single multiple requirements the motivates this work. First, we formally define three attributes test: specification that characterizes behaviors observed execution, environment, and policy. Using me...