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Institute Name: Facultes Universitaires de Namur, Institut d'Informatique Description: The `Institut d'Informatique' of the `Facultes Universitaires de Namur' was established in 1970 and being a pionneer of computer science education, in Belgium. It is the largest department in terms of students and staff, of the french part of Belgium, It has 13 members of permanent academic staff and about 35 research associates. The `Institut d'Informatique' has a long tradition of contacts with industry.
The Department is organised into a number of research sections. The section which will contribute to this project is the Cooperative Information Systems section which focuses on methods, models, languages and tools supporting the analysis and design of distributed systems where heterogeneous agents (persons, software components, devices, etc.) are cooperating together to achieve goals of the organization. The section comprises 3 permanent academic staff and 6 research associates.
In this section, an important project is concerned with requirements engineering. Since 1992, mainly under the framework of the Esprit II ICARUS project, the RE team (4.5 persons) has been involved in the development of the ALBERT language (an acronym for ``Agent-oriented Language for Building and Eliciting Requirements for real-Time systems''), a language that has been designed for modelling functional requirements related to distributed heterogeneous real-time cooperative systems. Other related on-going projects and collaborations include:
- The study of the relationship between the ALBERT language and other existing languages based on the `agent' paradigm( part of an Esprit III BRA project called MODELAGE) Cooperation with the University of Toronto in investigating the coupling of Albert's agents - at the specificational level - with the i* agents, at the organisational level - Work on the elaboration of a CIM methodology for distributed systems in close cooperation with Pegard (a Belgian private company) and with the Public Research Centre Henri Tudor (located in Luxembourg). Within that framework, we have also contacts with participants of the CIMOSA initiative (at the european level). This work is performed with the support of the Belgian Walloon Region.
- On-going cooperation protocol with the Portuguese SME Oblog Software, considering the development of methods and techniques to support the design of an information system architecture from requirements. The Portuguese company has developed and is marketing a workbench of tools for supporting the OBLOG approach at the design level. The objective of the collaboration is the development of a requirements engineering component that would be complement the existing workbench.
- An initiative related to the development of an environment of tools supporting the use of a formal method in the context of the capture of requirements for complex and critical distributed telecommunications systems. Such tools will help in the verification (analysis) and validation of requirements.
Researchers associated with the project:
Prof. P.Y. Schobbens
Brief CVs of Key Researchers:
Name: Prof. Pierre-Yves Schobbens
Nationality: Belgian
Academic Qualifications & Experience: Pierre-Yves Schobbens graduated in Philosophy in 1982, in Applied Mathematics and Economy in 1983, in Computer Science in 1984,`magna cum laude' from Univ. Cath. de Louvain, Belgium. He obtained his PhD. in Computer Science in 1992.
He has worked as a researcher in the team of Prof. Sintzoff (projects: Graal (Belgian SPPS)- ``Formal methods in Software Engineering'', Leibniz (Belgian SPPS)- ``Artificial Intelligence Methods in Software Development'', Tooluse (EEC ESPRIT I) -``Formalization of Software Development Methods'')and received grants for research positions at the Univivesity of Passau and at the ``Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale et d'Intelligence Artificielle'' (LIFIA, Grenoble) where he took part in the development of the executable algebraic specification language LPG and contributed to the working groups ``Ada-Europe Software Engineering Environments'' and ``Ada-Europe Formal Methods''. He has also worked as a senior researcher at CNRS in the ``Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Nancy (CRIN)''. Currently, he is an associate professor in Artificial Intelligence at the Univ. of Namur (FUNDP).
Dr. Schobbens is member of the working group ``Formal Methods Europe'' and co-founder of ``Ada-Belgium''.
He set up and the HCM Network ``Medicis'', which he also leads. He took part in the programme committee of ``VDM-Europe 1991''. He is the Coordinator of the ESPRIT III Bra MODELAGE. He has given invited tutorials at the International Workshop on Software Engineering and its Applications (Toulouse, Dec. 1988) and the ACM International Workshop on Formal Methods in Software Development (Napa, May 1990).
His research interests include extensions of algebraic specifications towards agent- and object-oriented concepts (concurrency and inheritance), non-monotonic reasoning, formal development from specifications, tool support for such developments
Selected Publications:
C. Lafontaine, Y. Ledru, P.-Y. Schobbens.(1991): An experiment in formal software development: using the B theorem prover on a VDM case study. Comm. ACM , Vol 34 n.5
P.-Y. Schobbens.(1993): Exceptions for Algebraic Specifications: On the meaning of ``but''. Science of Computer Programming , 20(1-2)
Contact Details:
Principal Investigator: Prof. Pierre-Yves Schobbens
Address:Institut d'Informatique, Facultes Universitaires de Namur, 21 rue Grandgagnage, Namur, B-5000, BELGIUM
Telephone number: + 32 81 72.49.90
Telefax number: + 32 81 72.49.67
EMail: pys@info.fundp.ac.be
List of Members