Self-activation and representation in systems integration

A formalism for the self-activation of agents called critics, which evaluate the effects of design changes in concurrent design environments and provide concise and relevant recommendations to other agents, is proposed. Grammar notation can be used to express the conditions under which a critic will activate. In this approach, (1) aspects are defined through grammars, an individual aspect being a member of the extended language of the grammar of its aspect space; (2) operators have a tool program component that specifies a derivation sequence in the grammar of the output aspect space of the operator; and (3) critics are tools with a set of critic rules that examine instantiations in input aspect spaces for preconditions and execute tool programs when those preconditions are met. It is observed that critic rules could permit the explicit specification of the conditions under which activation could occur