Compositional Verification of Multi-agent Systems in Temporal Multi-epistemic Logic

Engelfriet, Joeri; Jonker, Catholijn M.; Treur, Jan

doi:10.1007/3-540-49057-4_12

Cited by 19 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 13 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…A future continuation of this work will address [11] the development of tools for verification. To support the handwork of verification it would be useful to have tools to assist in the creation of the proof.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, linear or branching time temporal logic are appropriate to specify various agent (system) behavioural properties. Examples of the use of specification languages based on such variants of temporal logic are described, for example in [11], [14], [22]. However, to specify adaptive properties such as 'exercise improves skill' as well, a comparison between different histories has to be explicitly expressed.…”

Section: Language and Semantics Usedmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Compositional Verification of a Multi-Agent System for One-to-Many Negotiation

Brazier¹,

Cornelissen²,

Gustavsson³

et al. 2004

Applied Intelligence

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Verification of multi-agent systems hardly occurs in design practice. One of the difficulties is that required properties for a multi-agent system usually refer to multi-agent behaviour which has nontrivial dynamics. To constrain these multi-agent behavioural dynamics, often a form of organisational structure is used, for example, for negotiating agents, by following strict protocols. The claim is that these negotiation protocols entail a structured process that is manageable with respect to analysis, design and execution of such a multi-agent system. In this paper this is shown by a case study: verification of a multi-agent system for one-to-many negotiation in the domain of load balancing of electricity use. A compositional verification method for multi-agent systems is applied that allows to (1) logically relate dynamic properties of the multi-agent system as a whole to dynamic properties of agents, and (2) logically relate dynamic properties of agents to properties of their subcomponents. Given that properties of these subcomponents can be verified by more standard methods, these logical relationships provide proofs of the dynamic properties of the multi-agent system as a whole.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Language and Semantics Usedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Compositional Verification of a Multi-Agent System for One-to-Many Negotiation

Brazier¹,

Cornelissen²,

Gustavsson³

et al. 2004

Applied Intelligence

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Logic theories are also a major means for system verification through either theorem-proving (e.g. [20][21][22]) or model checking (e.g. [23]).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For more complex agents, however, an axiomatization is not so straightforward, and capturing the semantics of concurrent execution of agents is not easy [24]. A similar approach using temporal multi-epistemic logic [22] is investigated for DESIRE [25,26], a modeling framework for compositional specification of multiagent systems. The semantics and verification proofs of DESIRE specifications can be formalized in three-valued temporal multi-epistemic logic [22].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A similar approach using temporal multi-epistemic logic [22] is investigated for DESIRE [25,26], a modeling framework for compositional specification of multiagent systems. The semantics and verification proofs of DESIRE specifications can be formalized in three-valued temporal multi-epistemic logic [22]. Generally, axiomatic verification is inherently limited due to the well-known difficulty in automatic theorem-proving.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Modeling and Analyzing Multi-Agent Behaviors Using Predicate/Transition Nets

Volz

Ioerger

et al. 2003

Int. J. Soft. Eng. Knowl. Eng.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

How agents accomplish a goal task in a multi-agent system is usually specified by multiagent plans built from basic actions (e.g. operators) of which the agents are capable. The plan specification provides the agents with a shared mental model for how they are supposed to collaborate with each other to achieve the common goal. Making sure that the plans are reliable and fit for the purpose for which they are designed is a critical problem with this approach. To address this problem, this paper presents a formal approach to modeling and analyzing multi-agent behaviors using Predicate/Transition (PrT) nets, a high-level formalism of Petri nets. We model a multi-agent problem by representing agent capabilities as transitions in PrT nets. To analyze a multi-agent PrT model, we adapt the planning graphs as a compact structure for reachability analysis, which is coherent to the concurrent semantics. We also demonstrate that one can analyze whether parallel actions specified in multi-agent plans can be executed in parallel and whether the plans can achieve the goal by analyzing the dependency relations among the transitions in the PrT model.

show abstract