Many wide-area distributed applications can be implemented using distributed group communication, a mechanism for coordinating the activities of related processes running at different sites. We have developed a modular architecture for group communication systems that can be used to build a system tailored to application requirements. We focus on weak consistency mechanisms for group communicat...

In this work we present a novel approach to check the consistency of agent designs (prior to any implementation) with respect to the requirements specifications via automated planning. This checking is essentially a search problem which makes planning technology an appropriate solution. We focus our work on BDI agent systems and the Prometheus design methodology in order to directly compare our...

Software architecture and its related documentation are acknowledged as some of the most important artefacts created during system design. However, often the implemented system diverges, over time, from the designed architecture. This phenomenon is called architectural drift and is either a result of inconsistent evolution of the system, or a failure to keep the architectural documentation up t...

Belief integration methods are often aimed at deriving a single and consistent knowledge base that retains as much as possible of the knowledge bases to integrate. The rationale behind this approach is the minimal change principle: the result of the integration process should differ as less as possible from the knowledge bases to integrate. We show that this principle can be reformulated in ter...