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OPERAS: A Framework for the Formal Modelling of Multi-Agent Systems and Its Application to Swarm-Based Systems

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Engineering Societies in the Agents World VIII (ESAW 2007)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 4995))

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Abstract

Swarm-based systems are a class of multi-agent systems (MAS) of particular interest because they exhibit emergent behaviour through self-organisation. They are biology-inspired but find themselves applicable to a wide range of domains, with some of them characterised as mission critical. It is therefore implied that the use of a formal framework and methods would facilitate modelling of a MAS in such a way that the final product is fully tested and safety properties are verified. One way to achieve this is by defining a new formalism to specify MAS, something which could precisely fit the purpose but requires significant period to formally prove the validation power of the method. The alternative is to use existing formal methods thus exploiting their legacy. In this paper, we follow the latter approach. We present OPERAS, an open framework that facilitates formal modelling of MAS through employing existing formal methods. We describe how a particular instance of this framework, namely OPERAS XC , could integrate the most prominent characteristics of finite state machines and biological computation systems, such as X-machines and P Systems respectively. We demonstrate how the resulting method can be used to formally model a swarm system and discuss the flexibility and advantages of this approach.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. South-East European Research Centre, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Ioanna Stamatopoulou

  2. Department of Computer Science, CITY College, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Petros Kefalas

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK

    Marian Gheorghe

Authors
  1. Ioanna Stamatopoulou
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  2. Petros Kefalas
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  3. Marian Gheorghe
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Alexander Artikis Gregory M. P. O’Hare Kostas Stathis George Vouros

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Stamatopoulou, I., Kefalas, P., Gheorghe, M. (2008). OPERAS: A Framework for the Formal Modelling of Multi-Agent Systems and Its Application to Swarm-Based Systems. In: Artikis, A., O’Hare, G.M.P., Stathis, K., Vouros, G. (eds) Engineering Societies in the Agents World VIII. ESAW 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4995. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87654-0_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87654-0_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-87653-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-87654-0

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