(Re)designing Specification Languages for Incremental Development my Multiple Agents

What is it about?

There are already many specification languages out there that are great at capturing powerful concepts, expressing complex relationships, and affording many forms of complex (automated) analysis. However, problems arise when they are applied to the specification of complex, inter-organisational systems. In a nutshell, it is difficult for these requirements to be expressed in a form that survives being assembled into a cohesive specification, without conflicting requirements creating logical inconsistencies, or some requirements being lost in the process. This work frames the problem as a need to express meta-level requirements: requirements on the specification process itself. The agents need to be able to specify what their peers can(not) specify! We propose several encodings of meta-level requirements, as extensions to several existing specification languages (eFLINT, Alloy, and Datalog). Via simple examples, we demonstrate how these extensions enable the successful specification of new scenarios, which are inspired by our intended application to the domain of inter-organisational, distributed, data exchange and processing systems.

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Why is it important?

Formal specifications are excellent tools for clarifying our requirements on complex systems, and systematising the way we regulate their usage and behaviour. Our contributions help to make these tools applicable to new scenarios. Consequently, these complex, inter-organisational systems (which need it the most) become more reliable and controllable.