4 research outputs found
Abstraction in Model Checking Multi-Agent Systems
This thesis presents existential abstraction techniques for multi-agent systems preserving temporal-epistemic
specifications. Multi-agent systems, defined in the interpreted system frameworks,
are abstracted by collapsing the local states and actions of each agent. The goal of abstraction
is to reduce the state space of the system under investigation in order to cope with the state
explosion problem that impedes the verification of very large state space systems. Theoretical
results show that the resulting abstract system simulates the concrete one. Preservation
and correctness theorems are proved in this thesis. These theorems assure that if a temporal-epistemic
formula holds on the abstract system, then the formula also holds on the concrete
one. These results permit to verify temporal-epistemic formulas in abstract systems instead of
the concrete ones, therefore saving time and space in the verification process.
In order to test the applicability, usefulness, suitability, power and effectiveness of the abstraction
method presented, two different implementations are presented: a tool for data-abstraction
and one for variable-abstraction. The first technique achieves a state space reduction by collapsing
the values of the domains of the system variables. The second technique performs a
reduction on the size of the model by collapsing groups of two or more variables. Therefore, the
abstract system has a reduced number of variables. Each new variable in the abstract system
takes values belonging to a new domain built automatically by the tool. Both implementations
perform abstraction in a fully automatic way. They operate on multi agents models specified
in a formal language, called ISPL (Interpreted System Programming Language). This is the
input language for MCMAS, a model checker for multi-agent systems. The output is an ISPL
file as well (with a reduced state space).
This thesis also presents several suitable temporal-epistemic examples to evaluate both techniques.
The experiments show good results and point to the attractiveness of the temporal-epistemic
abstraction techniques developed in this thesis. In particular, the contributions of
the thesis are the following ones:
• We produced correctness and preservation theoretical results for existential abstraction.
• We introduced two algorithms to perform data-abstraction and variable-abstraction on
multi-agent systems.
• We developed two software toolkits for automatic abstraction on multi-agent scenarios:
one tool performing data-abstraction and the second performing variable-abstraction.
• We evaluated the methodologies introduced in this thesis by running experiments on
several multi-agent system examples