China 
Africa 
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Relating civil engineering concepts intensionally by Galois connections
Published in Manuel Martínez, Raimar Scherer, eWork and eBusiness in Architecture, Engineering and Construction, 2020
In this paper, we show how central civil engineering concepts of distinct kinds can be related by means of Galois connections. This is done by specifying abstract, formal models of the concepts and then defining Galois connections which dually connects these models. The concepts examined are mere examples by which we outline a modelling methodology for enriching formal ontologies of the civil engineering domain. Thus, we believe that our contribution – in its mathematics – adds clarity and transparency to the domain of civil engineering as well as to the area of modelling methodology in civil engineering research and software systems. In formalizations, we use the RAISE Specification Language (RSL) (RAISE Language Group 1992).
Avoiding adverse autonomous agent actions
Published in Human–Computer Interaction, 2022
It would be both desirable and actually rather gratifying then if, in counter to each of these prospective weaknesses, we could specify a variety of provably effective formal methods which would test and indemnify us against any untoward outcomes of a singular or interactive group of autonomous systems. However, the problem of unbounded operational state proliferation immediately raises its head. The real issue is that the expansion rate of potential states rapidly becomes an intractable and even irreducible problem. There have been many, and indeed ingenious efforts to seek to resolve this issue (see e.g., Luckcuck et al., 2019). Some of these strategies certainly hold some degree of promise and, if we are able to parse and contain the operational degrees of freedom and their interactions to an effective extent, some progress might remain feasible (Russell et al., 2015). However, when even prototype autonomous systems are released ‘into the wild,’ they will begin to generate their own unique and recondite states and so, as one seeks to resolve the problem by containment, that very stricture is fractured by the fundamental nature of the autonomy one is examining. It is this challenge that makes autonomy part of the domain of ‘wicked’ problems (e.g., Ritchey, 2013). This question is one that is discussed, evaluated, and debated extensively in areas such as computer science, software engineering etc. and so this challenge to develop such reliable formal methods is only briefly mentioned here to raise an awareness of these efforts, rather than any detailed exposition to resolve them.