A systematic approach for detecting faults in agent designs

This thesis proposes a mechanism, including automated tool support, for early-phase defect detection by comparing the plan structures of a belief-desire-intention (BDI) agent design against the following: (1) requirement models, specified in terms of scenarios and goals; and (2) agent communication models. The intuition of our approach is to extract sets of possible behaviour runs from the agent-behaviour models and to verify whether these runs conform to the specifications of the system-to-be. The proposed approach in this thesis is applicable at design time and does not require source code. Our approach is based on the Prometheus agent-design methodology but is applicable to other methodologies that support the same notions. We evaluate the proposed verification framework on designs, ranging from student projects to case studies of industry-level projects. Our evaluation demonstrates that even a simple specification developed by relatively experienced developers is prone to defects, and our approach is successful in uncovering most of these defects. In addition, we conduct a scalability analysis of our methods, and the outcomes reveal that our approach can scale when designs grow in size

AUML protocols: from specification to detailed design

In this work, we show how AUML protocol specifications in the Prometheus methodology can be automatically propagated to the detailed design of the methodology by creating appropriate artefacts. The approach is general to all design methodologies that follow the BDI model of agents

Early detection of design faults relative to requirement specifications in agent-based models

Agent systems are used for a wide range of applications, and techniques to detect and avoid defects in such systems are valuable. In particular, it is desirable to detect issues as early as possible in the software development lifecycle. We describe a technique for checking the plan structures of a BDI agent design against the requirements models, specified in terms of scenarios and goals. This approach is applicable at design time, not requiring source code. A lightweight evaluation demonstrates that a range of defects can be found using this technique

Checking consistency of agent designs against interaction protocols for early-phase defect location

Multi-agent systems are increasingly being used in complex applications due to features such as autonomy, proactivity, exibility, robustness and social ability. However, these very features also make verifying multi-agent systems a challeng- ing task. In this paper, we propose a mechanism, including automated tool support, for early phase defect detection by comparing agent interaction speci cations with the detailed design of the agents participating in the interactions. The basic intuition of our approach is to extract sets of possi- ble traces from the agent design and to verify whether these traces conform to the protocol speci cations. Our approach is based on the Prometheus agent design methodology but is applicable to other similar methodologies. Our initial eval- uation shows that even simple protocols developed by rela- tively experienced developers are prone to defects, and our approach is successful in uncovering some of these defects

Propagating AUML protocols to detailed design

The interaction between agents is a key aspect of multi-agent systems. AUML sequence diagrams are commonly used to specify these interactions between agents in terms of interaction protocols. Whilst most of the popular agent oriented software engineering methodologies such as Prometheus, Tropos, O-MaSE, INGENIAS and GAIA support AUML protocol specifications in the design, the supportive tools do not provide any mechanisms for ensuring that the detailed design, and consequently the implementations, faithfully follow these protocols. In this paper, we show how AUML protocol specifications in the Prometheus methodology can be automatically propagated to the detailed design of the methodology by creating appropriate artefacts. The approach is general to all design methodologies that follow the BDI model of agents. We empirically show that the manual translation of protocols to the detailed design even for a simple AUML protocol can be a tedious and error-prone task for even relatively experienced users. The evaluation shows that our automated approach address these issues to a large extent

A framework for automatically ensuring the conformance of agent designs

Multi-agent systems are increasingly being used in complex applications due to features such as autonomy, pro-activity, flexibility, robustness and social ability. These very features also make verifying multi-agent systems a challenging task. In this article, we propose a mechanism, including automated tool support, for early phase defect detection by comparing the plan structures of a Belief-Desire-Intention agent design against the requirements models and interaction protocols. The basic intuition of our approach is to extract sets of possible behaviour runs from the agents' behaviour models and to verify whether these runs conform to the specifications of the system-to-be or not. This approach is applicable at design time, not requiring source code, thus enabling detection and removal of some defects at an early phase of the software development lifecycle. We followed an experimental approach for evaluating the proposed verification framework. Our evaluation shows that even simple system's specifications developed by relatively experienced developers are prone to defects, and our approach is successful in uncovering most of these defects. In addition, we conducted a scalability analysis on the approach, and the outcomes show that our approach can scale when designs grow in size

Requirements specification via activity diagrams for agent-based systems

Goal-oriented agent systems are increasingly popular for developing complex applications that operate in highly dynamic environments. As with any software these systems have to be designed starting with the specification of system requirements. In this paper, we extend a popular agent design methodology, Prometheus, and improve the understandability and maintainability of requirements by automatically generating UML activity diagrams from existing requirements models; namely scenarios and goal hierarchies. This approach aims to overcome some of the ambiguity present in the current requirements specification in Prometheus and provide more structure for representing variations. Even though our approach is grounded in Prometheus, it can be generalised to all the methodologies that support similar notions in specifying requirements (i.e. notions of goals and scenarios). We present our approach and an evaluation based on user experiments. The evaluation showed that the activity diagram based approach enhances people's understanding of the requirements, makes it easier to modify requirements, and easier to check them against the detailed design of the agents for coverage

Checking the correctness of agent designs against model-based requirements

Agent systems are used for a wide range of applications, and techniques to detect and avoid defects in such systems are valuable. In particular, it is desirable to detect issues as early as possible in the software development lifecycle. We describe a technique for checking the plan structures of a BDI agent design against the requirements models, specified in terms of scenarios and goals. This approach is applicable at design time, not requiring source code. A lightweight evaluation demonstrates that a range of defects can be found using this technique