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Efficient Verification of MASs with Projections

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Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8758))

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Abstract

Constrained global types are a powerful means to represent agent interaction protocols. In our recent research we used them to represent complex protocols in a very compact way, and we exploited them to dynamically verify actual agents’ interactions with respect to different protocols in both Jason and JADE. The main drawback of our previous approach is the full centralization of the monitoring activity, which is delegated to a unique monitor agent in charge of verifying that the messages exchanged among all the agents are compliant with the protocol. This approach works well for MASs with few agents, but could become unsuitable in communication-intensive and highly-distributed MASs where hundreds of agents should be monitored.

In this paper we define an algorithm for projecting a constrained global type onto a set of agents Ags, by restricting it to the interactions involving agents in Ags, so that the outcome of the algorithm is another constrained global type where interactions involve only agents in Ags. The projection mechanism is the first step towards distributing the monitoring activity, making it safer and more efficient: the compliance of a MAS to a protocol could be dynamically verified by suitably partitioning the agents of the MAS into small sets of agents, and by assigning to each partition Ags a local monitor agent which checks all interactions involving Ags against the projected constrained global type.

Although the projection of well formed constrained global types can be always performed, the resulting projected protocol does not always model all the constraints as the original one. We describe a generate and test algorithm that provides hints on the correctness of the protocol distribution, leaving for further investigation the formal characterization of which protocols can be distributed onto which agents’ subsets.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. DIBRIS, University of Genova, Italy

    Davide Ancona, Daniela Briola & Viviana Mascardi

  2. LIP6, University Pierre and Marie Curie, Paris, France

    Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni & Patrick Taillibert

Authors
  1. Davide Ancona
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  2. Daniela Briola
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  3. Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni
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  4. Viviana Mascardi
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  5. Patrick Taillibert
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, Princetonplein 5, De Uithof, 3584 CC, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Fabiano Dalpiaz

  2. Department of Informatics, Clausthal University of Technology, Julius-Albert-Str. 4, 38678,, Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany

    JĂĽrgen Dix

  3. Department of Intelligent Systems, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Mekelweg 4, 2628 CD, Delft, The Netherlands

    M. Birna van Riemsdijk

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Ancona, D., Briola, D., El Fallah Seghrouchni, A., Mascardi, V., Taillibert, P. (2014). Efficient Verification of MASs with Projections. In: Dalpiaz, F., Dix, J., van Riemsdijk, M.B. (eds) Engineering Multi-Agent Systems. EMAS 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8758. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14484-9_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14484-9_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-14483-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-14484-9

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