Verifying Agent Conformance with Protocols Specified in a Temporal Action Logic

Abstract. The paper addresses the problem of agents compatibility and their conformance to protocols. We assume that the specification of pro-tocols is given in an action theory by means of temporal constraints and, in particular, communicative actions are defined in terms of their effects and preconditions on the social state of the protocol. We show that the problem of verifying the conformance of an agent with a protocol can be solved by making use of an automata based approach, and that the conformance of a set of agents with a protocol guarantees that their in-teraction cannot produce deadlock situations and it only gives rise to runs of the protocol.