Formal Analysis of an Agent-Based Medical Diagnosis Confirmation System

Abstract

One of the most challenging issues nowadays in the software community is the development of systems providing a certain level of quality at reasonable cost and time delay. This is reflected in the fact that many important application areas such as aeronautics, nuclear energy, telecommunication or medical applications require a high level of reliability and safety. A cost reduction and increased reliability policy requires adopting rigorous methodologies at the earlier phases of the development process where it is cheaper to fix the deficiencies that may arise. Rigorous and precise development can be achieved using formal methods. The use of formal methods in software development improves the insight into and understanding of requirements, help clarify the customer’s requirements by highlighting or avoiding contradictions and ambiguities in the specifications, enables rigorous verification of specifications and their software implementations. In spite of these benefits, the utilization of formal methods in industry is relatively restricted, due primarily, among other reasons, to the esoterism and lack of friendliness of the formalisms, and the lack of industrial tool support and so on.