Requirements, Formal Verification and Model transformations of an Agent-based System: A CASE STUDY

Abstract

One of the most challenging tasks in software specifications engineering for a multi-agent system is to ensure correctness. As these systems have high concurrency, often have dynamic environments, the formal specification and verification of these systems along with step-wise refinement from abstract to concrete concepts play major role in system correctness. Our objectives are the formal specification, analysis with respect to functional as well as non-functional properties by step-wise refinement from abstract to concrete specifications and then formal verification of these specifications. A multi-agent system is concurrent system with processes working in parallel with synchronization between them. We have worked on Gaia multi-agent method along with finite state process based finite automata techniques and as a result we have defined the formal specifications of our system, checked the correctness and verified all possible flow of concurrent executions of these specifications. Our contribution consists in transforming requirement specifications based on organizational abstractions into executable formal verification specifications based on finite automata. We have considered a case study of our multi-agent system to exemplify formal specifications and verification.

Keywords: Multi-Agent System, Agent Models and Architecture, Gaia multi-agent method, Formal methods, Formal verification, Finite State Process (FSP), Labelled Transition System (LTS), Labelled Transition System Analyzer (LTSA), Safety property, Liveness property