Compositional refinements in multiple blackboard systems

Abstract

In this paper we introduce CONESP, a concurrent system built according to the SMoLCS methodology to provide an abstract model of the coordination language Extended Shared Prolog (ESP). ESP is based on the integration of the blackboard paradigm with Logic Programming. CONESP is a hierarchy of entities, each consisting of a passive blackboard tree and a collection of active components including parallel agents and dynamic (sub) entities. An implementation relation between two hierarchies is defined, which is shown to be compositional. ESP is being used in the Oikos environment for software process modeling. The results of this paper are the base for the formal verification of the correctness of the software process models built by stepwise-refinements in Oikos.