Expressing inter-perspective relationships: a logical approach

The requirement engineering activity (for composite systems) implies the existence of several viewpoints on the software to be designed. The specifications will be issued from those different perspectives which complement but also contradict each other. Notably each perspective may be specified using a particular language. Consequently the central problem is to express links between those perspectives, i.e. the specification fragments. This article outlines a multi agent system for expressing the inter perspective relationships. Each perspective is associated with an agent. The distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) framework allows one to represent links between perspectives and to represent the dynamics of those links. Notably, our multi agent system can represent temporal constraints on the dynamics of the relations between the agents and then between the perspectives. To this end we characterize the inter perspective relationships. A logical approach of these relationships based on temporal logic is then presented and discussed.