Despite the plethora of frameworks and tools for developing agent systems, there is a remarkable lack of generalised methodologies for assessing their performance. Existing methods in the field of software engineering do not adequately address the unpredictable and complex nature of intelligent agents. We introduce a generic methodology for evaluating agent performance; the Agent Performance Ev...

Most SVRC technical reports are available via anonymous ftp, from svrc.it.uq.edu.au in the directory /pub/techreports. Abstracts and compressed postscript les are available from Abstract This paper presents a method of formally specifying systems involving continuous variables and real-time constraints using the object-oriented state-based speciication language Object-Z together with the timed ...

This paper describes an approach to transferring techniques of refactorings to formal methods. We use syntactical rewriting rules to express refactorings on Object-Z specifications. In contrast to programming languages here refactorings can be formally proven to preserve the behaviour of the specification. We give an outline of such a proof of behaviour preservation.

This paper presents an approach and a tool to increase specification quality by using a combination of UML and formal languages. Our approach is based on the expression of the UML class diagram and its annotations into a Z formal specification. Our tool called RoZ supports this approach by making the transition between the UML world and the Z world : from an annotated class diagram, it automati...

Requirements analysis and design specification is a serious issue in software engineering because of semantics involved in the transformation of real world problems to computational models. Unified Modeling Language (UML) has been accepted as a standard for design and development of object oriented systems. Unfortunately, most of UML structures are based on graphical notations and are prone to ...

UML is now an ISO standard used for graphically representing software systems. It possesses key advantages such as simplicity, intuitiveness and recently it has been considered as a semi-formal specification notation. However, UML falls short in the latter area because it utilizes loose semantics which leads to ambiguity among its models. In some cases ambiguity can be negligible, however in sa...

This paper gives a contribution in the efforts of Semantic web ontology development. We have developed the core ontology for Specification and Description Language (SDL), an object-oriented, formal language defined by the International Telecommunications Union Telecommunications Standardization Sector (ITU-T) as recommendation Z.100. The language is intended for the specification of complex, ev...

In this study, we concern with how a group of rectifiers can be worked on preparing and producing correct formal software specification and how can they communicate with each other. To address these subjects, we come into view of two different issues, collaborative issues and formal specification issues. Each of these issues is taken into consideration when we propose the solution of the subjec...

Mobility is one of the most challenging issues in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) where nodes are self organized, there is no infrastructure or centralized control and the nodes move freely. Different protocols have been designed for routing the packets from source to destination, earlier to design of any protocols for MANET one of the most important issues to consider is how these protocols can...

Formal notations such as Z provide powerful support for writing clear specifications, and for undertaking proofs of properties of those specifications. In this paper, we explore one particular style of specification, with applications in control theory and real-time specification. The notation we define permits the accurate description of concepts in these fields without significant overhead or...