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Validation of BDI Agents

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Programming Multi-Agent Systems (ProMAS 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 4411))

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Abstract

Testing and Debugging multi-agent systems (MAS) – which are inherently concurrent and distributed – is a challenging task. While complex application scenarios demand intelligent entities with autonomous reasoning capabilities, the applied reasoning mechanisms impair current approaches to validate MAS implementations. Reactive planning systems, namely the well-known Belief Desire Intention (BDI) architecture, have been successfully applied to implement these intelligent entities by means of goal directed agents. Despite testing and debugging, used to validate whether implementations behave as intended, are crucial to serious development efforts, only minor attention has been payed to corresponding tool support and testing procedures for BDI–based MAS. In this paper, we examine how the reasoning mechanism inside agent implementations can be checked and how static analysis of agent declarations can be used to visualize and check the overall communication structure in closed MAS. We present corresponding tool support, which relies on the definition of crosscutting concerns in BDI agents and enables both approaches to the Jadex Agent Platform.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Distributed Systems and Information Systems, Computer Science Department, University of Hamburg, Vogt–Kölln–Str. 30, 22527 Hamburg, Germany

    Jan Sudeikat, Lars Braubach, Alexander Pokahr & Winfried Lamersdorf

  2. Multimedia Systems Laboratory, Department of Information and Electrical Engineering, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Berliner Tor 7, 20099 Hamburg, Germany

    Jan Sudeikat & Wolfgang Renz

Authors
  1. Jan Sudeikat
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  2. Lars Braubach
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  3. Alexander Pokahr
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  4. Winfried Lamersdorf
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  5. Wolfgang Renz
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Editor information

Rafael H. Bordini Mehdi Dastani Jürgen Dix Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni

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© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Sudeikat, J., Braubach, L., Pokahr, A., Lamersdorf, W., Renz, W. (2007). Validation of BDI Agents. In: Bordini, R.H., Dastani, M., Dix, J., Seghrouchni, A.E.F. (eds) Programming Multi-Agent Systems. ProMAS 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4411. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71956-4_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71956-4_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-71955-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-71956-4

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