Using multi-agent systems to go beyond temporal patterns verification

A key step in formal verification is the translation of requirements into logic formulae. Various flavours of temporal logic are commonly used in academia and in industry to capture, among others, liveness and safety requirements. In the past two decades there has been a substantial amount of work in the area of verification of extensions of temporal logic. In this column I will provide a high level overview of some work in this area, focussing in particular on the verification of temporal-epistemic properties, showing how temporal-epistemic logics can be used to capture requirements that are common in many concrete systems, and describing a model checker for multi-agent systems called MCMAS