Abstract
A high level specification provides the behavioral aspects of a protocol, i.e., the functional or logical properties. Such a specification should say what a protocol is allowed to do and not how it is achieved or implemented. State transition systems are mostly used to specify behavior of the agents (or robots) and temporal logic formulas are used to specify desirable properties of a system. TLA\(^+\) is a formal specification language designed to provide high level specifications of concurrent and distributed systems. We provide a formal specification of a team formation protocol using TLA\(^+\). TLC model checker is used to verify that the TLA\(^+\) specification satisfies some desirable properties of the protocol.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Lamport, L.: A simple approach to specifying concurrent systems. Commun. ACM 32(1), 32–45 (1989)
Lamport, L.: Specifying concurrent program modules. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 5(2), 190–222 (1983)
Gerkey, B.P., Mataric, M.J.: Sold!: auction methods for multirobot coordination. IEEE Trans. Robot. Autom. 18(5), 758–768 (2002)
Kong, Y., Zhang, M., Ye, D.: An auction-based approach for group task allocation in an open network environment. Comput. J. 59(3), 403–422 (2015)
Batson, B., Lamport, L.: High-level specifications: lessons from industry. In: de Boer, F.S., Bonsangue, M.M., Graf, S., de Roever, W.-P. (eds.) FMCO 2002. LNCS, vol. 2852, pp. 242–261. Springer, Heidelberg (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39656-7_10
Gjondrekaj, E., et al.: Towards a formal verification methodology for collective robotic systems. In: Aoki, T., Taguchi, K. (eds.) ICFEM 2012. LNCS, vol. 7635, pp. 54–70. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34281-3_7
Brambilla, M., Pinciroli, C., Birattari, M., Dorigo, M.: Property-driven design for swarm robotics. In: International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp. 139–146 (2012)
De Nicola, R., Ferrari, G., Pugliese, R.: KLAIM: a kernel language for agents interaction and mobility. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 24(5), 315–330 (1998)
De Nicola, R., Katoen, J., Latella, D., Loreti, M., Massink, M.: Model checking mobile stochastic logic. Theor. Comput. Sci. 382(1), 42–70 (2007)
Holzmann, G.: Spin Model Checker, The Primer and Reference manual. Addison Wesley Professional (2003)
Jackson, D.: Software Abstractions: Logic, Language, and Analysis. MIT Press (2006)
Jones, C.B.: Systematic Software Development using VDM. Prentice Hall (1990)
Konur, S., Dixon, C., Fisher, M.: Analysing robot swarm behavior via probabilistic model checking. Robot. Auton. Syst. 60(2), 199–213 (2012)
Konur, S., Dixon, C., Fisher, M.: Formal verification of probabilistic swarm behaviours. In: Dorigo, M., et al. (eds.) ANTS 2010. LNCS, vol. 6234, pp. 440–447. Springer, Heidelberg (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15461-4_42
Kwiatkowska, M., Norman, G., Parker, D.: PRISM: probabilistic symbolic model checker. In: International Conference on Modelling Techniques and Tools for Computer Performance Evaluation, pp. 200–204 (2002)
Lamport, L.: The TLA home page. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/tla/tla.html
Lamport, L.: Specifying Systems. The TLA\(^+\) Language and Tools for Hardware and Software Engineers. Addison-Wesley (2002)
Loreti, M.: SAM: Stochastic Analyser for Mobility. http://rap.dsi.unifi.it/SAM
Luckcuck, M., Farrell, M., Dennis, L.A., Dixon, C., Fisher, M.: Formal specification and verification of autonomous robotic systems: a survey. ACM Comput. Surv. 52(5), 1–41 (2020)
Newcombe, C., Rath, T., Zhang, F., Munteanu, B., Brooker, M., Deardeuff, M.: How Amazon web services uses formal methods. Commun. ACM 58(4), 66–73 (2015)
Spivey, M.: The Z Notation. Prentice Hall International (1992)
Webster, M.: Toward reliable autonomous robotic assistants through formal verification: a case study. Trans. Hum. Mach. Syst. 46(2), 186–196 (2016)
Webster, M., et al.: Formal verification of an autonomous personal robotic assistant. In: AAAI FVHMS, pp. 74–79 (2014)
Nath, A., Arun, A.R., Niyogi, R.: An approach for task execution in dynamic multirobot environment. In: Mitrovic, T., Xue, B., Li, X. (eds.) AI 2018. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 11320, pp. 71–76. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03991-2_7
Nath, A., Arun, A.R, Niyogi, R.: A distributed approach for autonomous cooperative transportation in a dynamic multi-robot environment. In: The 35th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, pp. 792–799 (2020)
Nath, A., Arun, A.R., Niyogi, R.: DMTF: a distributed algorithm for multi-team formation. In: 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, vol. 1, pp. 152–160 (2020)
Acknowledgements
The author was in part supported by a research grant from Google.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Niyogi, R. (2022). Formal Specification of a Team Formation Protocol. In: Barolli, L., Hussain, F., Enokido, T. (eds) Advanced Information Networking and Applications. AINA 2022. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 451. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99619-2_29
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99619-2_29
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-99618-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-99619-2
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)