Semantic Mutation Testing for Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

Abstract. This paper introduces semantic mutation testing (SMT) into multi-agent systems. SMT is a test assessment technique that makes changes to the in-terpretation of a program and then examines whether a given test set has the ability to detect each change to the original interpretation. These changes repre-sent possible misunderstandings of how the program is interpreted. SMT can al-so be used to assess robustness to and reliability of semantic changes. This pa-per applies SMT to three rule-based agent programming languages, namely Ja-son, GOAL and 2APL, provides several contexts in which SMT for these lan-guages is useful, and proposes three sets of semantic mutation operators (i.e., rules to make semantic changes) for these languages respectively, and a sys-tematic approach to derivation of semantic mutation operators for rule-based agent languages. This paper then shows, through preliminary evaluation of our semantic mutation operators for Jason, that SMT has some potential to assess tests, robustness to and reliability of semantic changes