Specifying in B the Influence/Reaction Model to Study Situated MAS: Application to vehicles platooning

International audienceThis paper addresses the formal specification and verification of situated Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) that can be formulated within the Influence/Reaction model as proposed in 1996 by Ferber \& Muller. In this model, our objective is to prove the correctness of reactive MAS with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods. This is an important step to bring MAS to high quality standards as required for critical applications encountered in domains such as transport systems. A generic B representation of systems instantiating the Influence/Reaction model is proposed, using patterns of specification. We illustrate our approach with a MAS to control unmanned land vehicles to form a platoon. The papers ends with considerations about further improvements of the framework, involving simulation and study of the properties of the system

Requirements of an Integrated Formal Method for Intelligent Swarms

NASA is investigating new paradigms for future space exploration, heavily focused on the (still) emerging technologies of autonomous and autonomic systems [47, 48, 49]. Missions that rely on multiple, smaller, collaborating spacecraft, analogous to swarms in nature, are being investigated to supplement and complement traditional missions that rely on one large spacecraft [16]. The small spacecraft in such missions would each be able to operate on their own to accomplish a part of a mission, but would need to interact and exchange information with the other spacecraft to successfully execute the mission

Reasoning about Goal-Plan Trees in Autonomous Agents: Development of Petri net and Constraint-Based Approaches with Resulting Performance Comparisons

Multi-agent systems and autonomous agents are becoming increasingly important in current computing technology. In many applications, the agents are often asked to achieve multiple goals individually or within teams where the distribution of these goals may be negotiated among the agents. It is expected that agents should be capable of working towards achieving all its currently adopted goals concurrently. However, in doing so, the goals can interact both constructively and destructively with each other, so a rational agent must be able to reason about these interactions and any other constraints that may be imposed on them, such as the limited availability of resources that could affect their ability to achieve all adopted goals when pursuing them concurrently. Currently, agent development languages require the developer to manually identify and handle these circumstances. In this thesis, we develop two approaches for reasoning about the interactions between the goals of an individual agent. The first of these employs Petri nets to represent and reason about the goals, while the second uses constraint satisfaction techniques to find efficient ways of achieving the goals. Three types of reasoning are incorporated into these models: reasoning about consumable resources where the availability of the resources is limited; the constructive interaction of goals whereby a single plan can be used to achieve multiple goals; and the interleaving of steps for achieving different goals that could cause one or more goals to fail. Experimental evaluation of the two approaches under various different circumstances highlights the benefits of the reasoning developed here whilst also identifying areas where one approach provides better results than the other. This can then be applied to suggest the underlying technique used to implement the reasoning that the agent may want to employ based on the goals it has been assigned

Generic Expression in B of the Influence/Reaction Model: Specifying and Verifying Situated Multi-Agent Systems

This paper addresses the formal specification and verification of situated multi-agent systems that can be formulated within the influence-reaction model as proposed in 1996 by Ferber & Muller. In this framework our objective is to prove the correctness of reactive multi-agent systems with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods. This is an important step to bring multi-agent systems to high quality standards as required for critical applications encountered in domains such as transport systems. A generic B writing of systems instantiating the influence reaction model is proposed, using patterns of specification. An illustration is then presented on the formal specification of a system operating electrical vehicles under precise automatic control at close spacings to form a platoon. The papers ends with considerations about further improvements of the framework, involving simulation and study of the properties of the system

Extensão da biblioteca Repast para desenho em tempo real de redes de Petri em representação de simulações multi-agente

A utilização de plataformas de modelação e de simulação baseada em agentes tem aumentado ultimamente em comunidades de investigação de diversos domínios científicos. A ferramenta Repast (Recursive Porous Agent Simulation Toolkit) é uma das plataformas mais utilizadas. A biblioteca é de utilização livre e o seu código fonte é fornecido gratuitamente, o que facilita a sua extensão a novas funcionalidades. Algumas das características ausentes nesta ferramenta, que poderiam auxiliar o estudo de simulações, são as noções de concorrência e de paralelismo. As representações e modelações gráficas destas características, na simulação multiagente, podem ser de grande utilidade. Este trabalho tem como objectivo colmatar esta questão através de uma extensão ao Repast de forma a permitir o desenho em tempo real de Redes de Petri em representação de simulações multi-agente.The use of agent-based modelling and simulation toolkits has been increasing lately in the research communities of various scientific fields. The tool Repast (Recursive Porous Agent Simulation Toolkit) is one of the most widely used platforms. The library is a free open source toolkit, which facilitates its extension to new features. Some of the features absent in this tool, which could help the study of simulations, are the concepts of competition and parallelism. The modelling and graphical representations of these features, in multi-agent simulation, can be very useful. This thesis aims to remedy this issue by conducting an extension to Repast, to design realtime Petri Nets representing multi-agent simulations