Complex behavior specification for autonomous systems

The author focuses on one of the problems of design of an autonomous reactive system, namely, specification of its behavior with respect to often unpredictable changes occurring in the real world. Several behavior-oriented languages are briefly presented, and some formal relationships between two of them, process transition networks and statecharts, are given. The goal is to address the need for augmenting the behavior-based design paradigm with theoretical tools adequate for expressing complex behaviors of autonomous reactive systems pursuing high-level goals and applicable to both analysis and synthesis tasks for such systems. They also provide some basis and suggestions for further research on unifying classical and artificial-intelligence-based approach to this problem