An Abstract Formal Basis for Digital Crowds

Crowdsourcing, together with its related approaches, has become very popular in recent years. All crowdsourcing processes involve the participation of a digital crowd, a large number of people that access a single Internet platform or shared service. In this paper we explore the possibility of applying formal methods, typically used for the verification of software and hardware systems, in analysing the behaviour of a digital crowd. More precisely, we provide a formal description language for specifying digital crowds. We represent digital crowds in which the agents do not directly communicate with each other. We further show how this specification can provide the basis for sophisticated formal methods, in particular formal verification.Comment: 32 pages, 4 figure

A fully abstract model for the exchange of information in multi-agent systems

In this paper, we present a semantic theory for the exchange of information inmulI8IAM8W systems. We consider the mulOI;IAMJ programminglrogram agent communication programming lprogram which integrates the paradigms of concurrent constraint programming and communicating sequential processes (CSP). The constraint programming techniques are used to represent and process information, whereas the synchronous communication mechanism from CSP is generalANN toenabl the exchange of information. The semantics of theleA8N6;O which is based on a general8;;OAl oftraditional failit semantics, is shown to beful8 abstract with respect to observing of each terminating computation its final gll; store of information