Design and verification of a coordination protocol for cooperating systems

Abstract

 This paper proposes an approach to producing a verified design of a complex intelligent system. The system is modeled using a hierarchical structure based on a coordination protocol. The coordination protocol and the system architecture are described using a state machine representation. The Clarke-McMillan Symbolic Model Checker based on branching time temporal logic is used to verify some of the desired formal properties of the protocol such as completeness, boundedness and termination. This work shows that the model checker helps to bring the automatic verification of complex intelligent systems closer to a practical proposition.