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Verification of lack of emergent behavior in extending a social network of agents

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Abstract

The scalability of the system is of vital importance in the design of social networks. This research attempts to establish a comprehensive framework for analysis and validation of requirements and design documents for software systems. In previous work, we applied this framework to analyze the requirements of a social network of agents with respect to scalability of the system. In our approach, system requirements were expressed using scenario-based specifications. Scenarios are appealing because of their expressive power and simplicity. Moreover, due to the clear and concise notation of scenarios, they can be used to analyze the system requirements for general validity, lack of deadlock, and existence of emergent behavior. In this paper a methodology is presented to formally verify that certain scenarios do not emerge in the system’s behavior. This methodology is devised to indicate whether or not the new requirements of the system are consistent with the current requirements in place. A larger prototype of a social network of MSA for semantic search is utilized to illustrate the developed methodology.

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Acknowledgments

This research was partially supported by a grant from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). M. Moshirpour would like to thank NSERC, Alberta Innovates-Technology Futures (AITF), and the Electrical and Computer Engineering department, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, for their logistics and financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr NW, Calgary, AB, T2N 1N4, Canada

    Mohammad Moshirpour, Shimaa M. El-Sherif & Behrouz H. Far

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr NW, Calgary, AB, T2N 1N4, Canada

    Reda Alhajj

  3. Department of Computer Science, Global University, Beirut, Lebanon

    Reda Alhajj

Authors
  1. Mohammad Moshirpour
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  2. Shimaa M. El-Sherif
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  3. Reda Alhajj
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  4. Behrouz H. Far
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Correspondence to Mohammad Moshirpour.

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Moshirpour, M., El-Sherif, S.M., Alhajj, R. et al. Verification of lack of emergent behavior in extending a social network of agents. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 5, 1 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-014-0242-0

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