ACCS Weekly Meeting
This week we have two dry run talks by two members of the ACCS, for conferences they are presenting at.

Place: Room 621, GP South (Building 78)
Time: Thursday 24th November, 10:30 morning Tea. 11:00am seminar

Talk #1:

Title: "Agent-based Virtual Insects"
Speaker: Katie Duczmal

Entomologists have been looking to apply computational modelling approaches
to the field of insect behaviour.  This seminar presents a first-cut design
of a system for creating virtual insects as agents, in which behaviour is
specified through an insect behaviour definition language based on
Teleo-Reactive principles.  These virtual insects are then simulated using a
combination of a plant simulation package and an agent system that
implements the insect behaviour.  This system will allow entomologists to
consider the validity of insect behaviour hypotheses by modelling and
visualising insect behaviour.


Talk #2:

Title: "An Automated Failure Mode and Effect Analysis based on High-Level
Design Specification with Behavior Trees"
Speaker: Dr. Lars Grunske

Abstract: Formal methods have significant benefits for developing safety
critical systems, in that they allow for correctness proofs, model checking
safety and liveness properties, deadlock checking, etc. However, formal
methods do not scale very well and demand specialist skills, when developing
real-world systems. For these reasons, development and analysis of
large-scale safety critical systems will require effective integration of
formal and informal methods. We use such an integrative approach to automate
Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), a widely used system safety
analysis technique, using a high-level graphical modelling notation
(Behavior Trees) and model checking. We inject component failure modes into
the Behavior Trees and translate the resulting Behavior Trees to SAL code.
This enables us to model check if the system in the presence of these faults
satisfies its safety properties, specified by temporal logic formulas. The
benefit of this process is tool support that automates the tedious and
error-prone aspects of FMEA.

The talk will be a test talk for the IFM 2005
(http://www.win.tue.nl/ifm/registration.html).