Michele Sevegnani

University of Glasgow | UofG · School of Computing Science

Belief–desire–intention (BDI) agents are a popular agent architecture. We extend conceptual agent notation ( Can )—a BDI programming language with advanced features such as failure recovery and declarative goals—to include probabilistic action outcomes, e.g. to reflect failed actuators, and probabilistic policies, e.g. for probabilistic plan and in...

Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents feature probabilistic outcomes, e.g. the chance an agent tries but fails to open a door, and non-deterministic choices: what plan/intention to execute next? We want to reason about agents under both probabilities and non-determinism to determine, for example, probabilities of mission success and the strategies u...

Bigraphs are a universal computational modelling formalism for the spatial and temporal evolution of a system in which entities can be added and removed. We extend bigraphs to probabilistic bigraphs, and then again to action bigraphs, which include non-determinism and rewards. The extensions are implemented in the BigraphER toolkit and illustrated...

Electric vehicles (EVs) are increasingly becoming an environmentally-friendly option in current transportation systems thanks to reduced fossil fuel consumption and carbon emission. However, the more widespread adoption of EVs has been hampered by two factors: the lack of charging infrastructure and the limited cruising range. Energy consumption es...

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are the core of Industry 4.0 applications, integrating advanced technologies such as sensing, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. This kind of combination typically consists of networked sensors and decision-making processes in which sensor-generated data drive the control decisions. Hence, the trustworthiness...

The Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) architecture is a popular framework for rational agents, yet most verification approaches are limited to analysing qualitative properties, for example whether an intention completes. BDI-based systems, however, operate in uncertain environments with dynamic behaviours: we may need quantitative analysis to establish...

The Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) architecture is a popular framework for rational agents; existing verification approaches either directly encode simplified (e.g. lacking features like failure recovery) BDI languages into existing verification frameworks (e.g. Promela), or reason about specific BDI language implementations. We take an alternative...

Human-autonomy teaming (HAT) scenarios feature humans and autonomous agents collaborating to meet a shared goal. For effective collaboration, the agents must be transparent and able to share important information about their operation with human teammates. We address the challenge of transparency for Belief-Desire-Intention agents defined in the Co...

Human-autonomy teaming (HAT) scenarios feature humans and autonomous agents collaborating to meet a shared goal. For effective collaboration, the agents must be transparent and able to share important information about their operation with human teammates. We address the challenge of transparency for Belief-Desire-Intention agents defined in the Co...

Bigraphs simultaneously model the spatial and non-spatial relationships between entities, and have been used for systems modelling in areas including biology, networking, and sensors. Temporal evolution can be modelled through a rewriting system, driven by a matching algorithm that identifies instances of bigraphs to be rewritten. The previous stat...

Designing and reasoning about complex systems such as wireless sensor networks is hard due to highly dynamic environments: sensors are heterogeneous, battery-powered, and mobile. While formal modelling can provide rigorous mechanisms for design/reasoning, they are often viewed as difficult to use. Graph rewrite-based modelling techniques increase u...

The Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) architecture is a popular framework for rational agents; most verification approaches are based on reasoning about implementations of BDI programming languages. We investigate an alternative approach based on reasoning about BDI agent semantics, through a model of the execution of an agent program. We employ Milner...

Bigraphs are a universal computational modelling formalism for the spatial and temporal evolution of a system in which entities can be added and removed. We extend bigraphs to probablistic bigraphs, and then again to action bigraphs, which include non-determinism and rewards. The extensions are implemented in the BigraphER toolkit and illustrated t...

We present a bisimulation relation for neighbourhood spaces, a generalisation of topological spaces. We show that this notion, path preserving bisimulation, preserves formulas of the spatial logic SLCS. We then use this preservation result to show that SLCS cannot express standard topological properties such as separation and connectedness. Further...

Industry 4.0 adopts Internet of Things (IoT) and service-oriented architectures to integrate Cyber-Physical Systems and Enterprise Planning into manufacturing operations. This kind of integration consists of a combination of connected sensors and run-time control algorithms. Consequential control decisions are driven by sensor-generated data. Hence...

We present a bisimulation relation for neighbourhood spaces, a generalisation of topological spaces. We show that this notion, path preserving bisimulation, preserves formulas of the spatial logic SLCS. We then use this preservation result to show that SLCS cannot express standard topological properties such as separation and connectedness. Further...

Bigraphs are a universal graph based model, designed for analysing reactive systems that include spatial and non-spatial (e.g. communication) relationships. Bigraphs evolve over time using a rewriting framework that finds instances of a (sub)-bigraph, and substitutes a new bigraph. In standard bigraphs, the applicability of a rewrite rule is determ...

Graphical IoT device management platforms, such as IoTtalk, make it easy to describe interactions between IoT devices. Applications are defined by dragging-and-dropping devices and specifying how they are connected, e.g. a door sensor controlling a light. While this allows simple and rapid development, it remains possible to specify unwanted device...

One of the applications popularized by the emergence of wireless sensor networks is target counting: the computational task of determining the total number of targets located in an area by aggregating the individual counts of each sensor. The complexity of this task lies in the fact that sensing ranges may overlap, and therefore, targets may be ove...

Large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSN) are increasingly deployed and an open question is how they can support multiple applications. Networks and sensing devices are typically heterogeneous and evolving: topologies change, nodes drop in and out of the network, and devices are reconfigured. The key question we address is how to verify that appli...

We present a formal model developed to reason about topologies created by sensor ranges. This model is used to formalise the topological aspects of an existing counting algorithm to estimate the number of targets in the area covered by the sensors. To that end, we present a first-order logic tailored to specify relations between parts of the space...

When a component fails in a critical communications service, how urgent is a repair? If we repair within 1 hour, 2 hours, or $n$ hours, how does this affect the likelihood of service failure? Can a formal model support assessing the impact, prioritisation, and scheduling of repairs in the event of component failures, and forecasting of maintenanc...

BigraphER is a suite of open-source tools providing an efficient implementation of rewriting, simulation, and visualisation for bigraphs, a universal formalism for modelling interacting systems that evolve in time and space and first introduced by Milner. BigraphER consists of an OCaml library that provides programming interfaces for the manipulati...

While HCI has a long tradition of formally modelling task-based interactions with graphical user interfaces, there has been less progress in modelling emerging ubiquitous computing systems due in large part to their highly contextual nature and dependence on unreliable sensing systems. We present an exploration of modelling an example ubiquitous sy...

In this paper, we present a bigraphical encoding of a simplified actor language with static topology. We express actor configurations in terms of sorted bigraphs while the rules of the actor operational semantics are encoded by bigraphical reactive rules. In MeMo2014: 1st International Workshop on Meta Models for Process Languages, 6 June 2014, B...

Bigraphical Reactive Systems (BRS) were designed by Milner as a universal formalism for modelling systems that evolve in time, locality, co-locality and connectivity. But the underlying model of location (the place graph) is a forest, which means there is no straightforward representation of locations that can overlap or intersect. This occurs in m...

We investigate how predictive event-based modelling can inform operational decision making in complex systems with component failures. By relating the status of components to service availability, and using stochastic temporal logic reasoning, we quantify the risk of service failure now, and in the future, after a given elapsed time. Decisions can...

Home wireless networks are difficult to manage and comprehend because of evolving locality, co-locality, connectivity and interaction. We define formal models of home wireless network infrastructure and policies and investigate how they can be used in a network management system designed to provide user-oriented support. We model spatial and tempor...

Stochastic bigraphical reactive systems (SBRS) is a recent formalism for modelling systems that evolve in time and space. However, the underlying spatial model is based on sets of trees and thus cannot represent spatial locations that are shared among several entities in a simple or intuitive way. We adopt an extension of the formalism, SBRS with s...

Bigraphs are a fully graphical process algebraic formalism, capable of representing both the position in space of agents and their inter-connections. However, they assume a topology based on sets of trees and thus cannot represent spatial locations that are shared among several entities in a simple or intuitive way. This is a problem, because share...

Runtime verification is analysis based on information extracted from a running system. Traditionally this involves reasoning about system states, for example using trace predicates. We have been investigating runtime verification for event-driven systems and in that context we propose a higher level of abstraction can be useful, namely reasoning at...

Bigraphical reactive systems are a formalism for modelling mobile computation. A bigraph consists of a place graph and a link graph; reaction rules define how place and link graphs evolve. Bigraphs originally supported only tree structures as place graphs, we have ex-tended the formalism to bigraphs with sharing, which allow directed acyclic graphs...