On the formal analysis of the dynamics of simulated agent societies

To analyze emergent behavior, a formal framework is needed to characterize the structure and dynamics of complex interaction-based multi-agent systems. We introduce an extension of an existing agent testbed for artificial societies making it possible to formally analyze the dynamics of the simulated agent system. The extension generates temporally annotated logical terms that describe parts of the dynamics of the simulated system. Based on these terms, it is possible to validate hypotheses about the system on different levels of aggregation, i.e. agent, group and system level. We present first results from a set of simple experiments in a class of artificial societies. © World Scientific Publishing Company