Verifying bounds on deliberation time in multi-agent systems

Rule-based agents (for example, agents reasoning using ontology rules) are increasingly being employed in the implementation of web services and other situations in which the time taken to generate a response is critical. To be able to provide a response time guarantee for such systems, it is important to know how long the agent’s reasoning is going to take. In this paper, we describe an approach to establishing an upper bound on deliberation time of a system of rule-based agents. We propose a formal model of a system of rule-based agents which associates explicit costs with each rule application. This formal model can serve as an input to a model-checker, allowing upper bounds on deliberation time to be automatically verified.