Assurance of Agent Systems: What Role Should Formal Verification Play?

Abstract

The Department of Information Science is one of seven departments that make up the School of Business at the University of Otago. The department offers courses of study leading to a major in Information Science within the BCom, BA and BSc degrees. In addition to undergraduate teaching, the department is also strongly involved in postgraduate research programmes leading to MCom, MA, MSc and PhD degrees. Research projects in spatial information processing, connectionist-based information systems, software engineering and software development, information engineering and database, software metrics, distributed information systems, multimedia information systems and information systems security are particularly well supported.The views expressed in this paper are not necessarily those of the department as a whole. The accuracy of the information presented in this paper is the sole responsibility of the authors. CopyrightCopyright remains with the authors. Permission to copy for research or teaching purposes is granted on the condition that the authors and the Series are given due acknowledgment. Reproduction in any form for purposes other than research or teaching is forbidden unless prior written permission has been obtained from the authors. CorrespondenceThis paper represents work to date and may not necessarily form the basis for the authors' final conclusions relating to this topic. It is likely, however, that the paper will appear in some form in a journal or in conference proceedings in the near future. The authors would be pleased to receive correspondence in connection with any of the issues raised in this paper, or for subsequent publication details. Please write directly to the authors at the address provided below. (Details of final journal/conference publication venues for these papers are also provided on the Department's publications web pages: http://www.otago.ac.nz/informationscience/pubs/). Any other correspondence concerning the Series should be sent to the DPS Coordinator. AbstractIn this paper we consider the broader issue of gaining assurance that an agent system will behave appropriately when it is deployed. We ask to what extent this problem is addressed by existing research into formal verification. We identify a range of issues with existing work which leads us to conclude that, broadly speaking, verification approaches on their own are too narrowly focussed. We argue that a shift in direction is needed, and outline some possibilities for such a shift in direction.

On the Testability of BDI Agent Systems

“…31. See the volume edited by Dastani et al (2010) for a recent overview of the current state-of-the-art, including a chapter on the role of formal methods in the assurance of agents (Winikoff, 2010). …”

Programming multi-agent systems

“…However, it is often infeasible to test every single situation in which the program could run. A testing approach for multi-agent programs is proposed by Poutakidis et al (2002Poutakidis et al ( , 2003 and Winikoff (2010). Testing is an indispensable part of evaluating multi-agent programs and should therefore be integrated in the existing debugging approaches.…”

Challenges and Directions for Engineering Multi-agent Systems

“…We note that this issue is broader than just verification against a specification [8]. For instance, specifications may be incomplete, and some aspects of desired behaviour may be difficult to specify.…”