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International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems

EMAS 2016: Engineering Multi-Agent Systems pp 59–80Cite as

Using Automatic Failure Detection for Cognitive Agents in Eclipse (AAMAS 2016 DEMONSTRATION)

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10093))

Abstract

In order to reduce debugging effort and enable automated failure detection, we proposed an automated testing framework for detecting failures in cognitive agent programs in previous work. This approach is based on a minimal set of temporal operators that enable the specification of test conditions with sufficient expressiveness for detecting all failures in an existing failure taxonomy. We also introduced an according approach for specifying test templates that supports a programmer in writing tests. In this demonstration paper, the automated test framework for the Goal agent programming language that has been created for the Eclipse platform is introduced, with a focus on its practical aspects, i.e., how to use it to detect failures in cognitive agents. As fault localization is an important follow-up to failure detection, the integration of the test framework in the existing source-level debugger for Goal is discussed as well. In addition, an empirical evaluation of the automated testing framework implementation for Goal is presented based on the work of almost 200 novice agent programmers.

An earlier version of this paper was demonstrated at the 2016 AAMAS conference and was published in its proceedings [18].

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See https://github.com/eishub/blocksworld for a description of this environment, and https://github.com/goalhub/agents/tree/master/src/main/goal/BlocksWorld for the agent system that is used as an example here.

  2. 2.

    See Sect. 6.10 of the Goal Guide [10] for more details on percept types in Goal.

  3. 3.

    We refer to Koeman et al. [15] for more details on the step out action.

  4. 4.

    See http://goalhub.github.io/eclipse for a demonstration(video) of the testing framework implementation and instructions on how to install Goal in Eclipse.

  5. 5.

    All (educational) agent environments are available at https://github.com/eishub.

  6. 6.

    See https://github.com/eishub/BW4T and/or Jonhson et al. [14].

  7. 7.

    Note that missing functionality was not considered a failure in these evaluations.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Vincent J. Koeman, Koen V. Hindriks & Catholijn M. Jonker

Authors
  1. Vincent J. Koeman
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  2. Koen V. Hindriks
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  3. Catholijn M. Jonker
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Correspondence to Vincent J. Koeman .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Università degli Studi di Torino, Turin, Italy

    Matteo Baldoni

  2. TU Clausthal, Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Niedersachsen, Germany

    Jörg P. Müller

  3. Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

    Ingrid Nunes

  4. University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas, USA

    Rym Zalila-Wenkstern

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Koeman, V.J., Hindriks, K.V., Jonker, C.M. (2016). Using Automatic Failure Detection for Cognitive Agents in Eclipse (AAMAS 2016 DEMONSTRATION). In: Baldoni, M., Müller, J., Nunes, I., Zalila-Wenkstern, R. (eds) Engineering Multi-Agent Systems. EMAS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10093. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50983-9_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50983-9_4

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