Telos: Representing Knowledge about Control Systems?

Abstract

Telos is a formal knowledge representation language designed for the development of information systems. It has been successfully applied in many different software development projects. Although the development of control systems also includes software development, it constitutes a completely different application domain. An in-depth analysis of the development process results in a set of key characteristics of this domain. Based on this set we investigate in this paper whether the features of Telos and its implementation ConceptBase are also valuable to support the development of control systems. We first review the existing application of the Telosbased, agent- and goal-oriented language i* to requirements modelling for control systems. Then we examine carefully each single feature of Telos and ConceptBase regarding the support of the identified key characteristics. This investigation shows that nearly all characteristics are well supported and only very few require further enhancements of Telos and ConceptBase.