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Synchronization of Multiple Agents in Rule-Based Development Environments

Barghouti, Naser S.

The Rule-Based Development Environment (RBDE) is recently-developed approach for providing intelligent assistance to developers working on a large-scale software projects. RBDEs model the development process in terms of rules, and then enact this model by automatically firing rules at the appropriate time. The RBDE approach has been used to develop single-user environment, but support for multiple developers cooperating on the same project is still not available because of the lack of mechanisms that can synchronize the efforts of multiple developers, who concurrently select commands, causing the firing of multiple rules (either directly or via chaining) that concurrently access shared data. Conflicts between different rules and concurrent .access to shared data may cause the violation of consistency in the project database, and thus necessitate the synchronization of concurrent activities. The conjecture of this proposal is that an RBDE can provide the required synchronization if it is provided with knowledge about what it means for the data of a specific project to be in a consistent state, and about the semantics of operations that developers perform on the data. The research that this paper proposes will formulate a frame work for specifying consistency of data in an RBDE, and formulate a mechanism for synchronizing the actions of concurrent rules fired on behalf of multiple developers cooperating on a common or different tasks.

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Academic Units
Computer Science
Publisher
Department of Computer Science, Columbia University
Series
Columbia University Computer Science Technical Reports, CUCS-504-89
Published Here
January 20, 2012