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.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Odell, J.: Objects and agents compared. Journal of Object Technology 1 (2002)
Brooks, R.A.: Elephants don’t play chess. Robotics and Auton. Sys. 6, 3–15 (1990)
Bratman, M.: Intentions, Plans, and Practical Reason. Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge (1987)
Rao, A.S., Georgeff, M.P.: BDI-agents: from theory to practice. In: Proceedings of the First Intl. Conference on Multiagent Systems (1995)
Georgeff, M.P., Lansky, A.L.: Reactive reasoning and planning: an experiment with a mobile robot. In: Proc. of AAAI 87, Seattle, Washington, pp. 677–682. AAAI Press, Menlo Park (1987)
Pokahr, A., Braubach, L., Lamersdorf, W.: A flexible BDI architecture supporting extensibility. In: The 2005 IEEE/WIC/ACM Int. Conf. on IAT-2005, ACM Press, New York (2005)
Jennings, N.R.: Building complex, distributed systems: the case for an agent-based approach. Comms. of the ACM 44 (4), 35–41 (2001)
Liedekerke, M.H.V., Avouris, N.M.: Debugging multi-agent systems. Information and Software Technology Journal 37, 103–112 (1995)
Ndumu, D.T., Nwana, H.S., Lee, L.C., Collis, J.C.: Visualising and debugging distributed multi-agent systems. Proc. of AGENTS ’99, 326–333 (1999)
Flater, D.W.: Debugging agent interactions: a case study. In: Proceedings of the 2001 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC), pp. 107–114. ACM Press, New York (2001)
Rao, A.S.: Agentspeak(l): Bdi agents speak out in a logical computable language. In: Perram, J., Van de Velde, W. (eds.) MAAMAW 1996. LNCS, vol. 1038, pp. 42–55. Springer, Heidelberg (1996)
Braubach, L., Pokahr, A., Lamersdorf, W., Moldt, D.: Goal representation for BDI agent systems. In: Bordini, R.H., Dastani, M., Dix, J., Seghrouchni, A.E.F. (eds.) Programming Multi-Agent Systems. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3346, Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Pokahr, A., Braubach, L., Lamersdorf, W.: A bdi architecture for goal deliberation. In: Proc. of AAMAS ’05, pp. 1295–1296 (2005)
Busetta, P., Howden, N., Rönnquist, R., Hodgson, A.: Structuring BDI agents in functional clusters. In: Jennings, N.R. (ed.) ATAL 1999. LNCS, vol. 1757, pp. 277–289. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Menzies, T., Pecheur, C.: Verification and validation and artificial intelligence. In: Zelkowitz, M. (ed.) Advances in Computers, vol. 65, Elsevier, Amsterdam (2005)
Timm, I.J., Scholz, T.: From Testing to Theorem Proving (Part IV). In: Multiagent Engineering. Theory and Applications in Enterprises. International Handbooks on Information Systems, pp. 531–554. Springer, Heidelberg (2006), doi:10.1007/3-540-32062-8
Sudeikat, J., Renz, W.: Monitoring group behavior in goal–directed agents using co–efficient plan observation. In: Padgham, L., Zambonelli, F. (eds.) AOSE VII / AOSE 2006. LNCS, vol. 4405, Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Padgham, L., Winikoff, M., Poutakidis, D.: Adding debugging support to the prometheus methodology. Engin. Applications of Art. Intel. 18, 173–190 (2005)
Chesani, F.: Formalization and verification of interaction protocols. In: Gabbrielli, M., Gupta, G. (eds.) ICLP 2005. LNCS, vol. 3668, pp. 437–438. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Botía, J.A., López-Acosta, A., Gómez-Skarmeta, A.F.: ACLAnalyser: A tool for debugging multi-agent systems. In: ECAI, pp. 967–968 (2004)
Lam, D.N., Barber, K.S.: Automated interpretation of agent behavior. In: Workshop for Agent-Oriented Information Systems (AOIS-2005) (2005)
Lam, D.N., Barber, K.S.: Comprehending agent software. In: Proc. of the 4th int. joint conf. on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (AAMAS ’05) (2005)
Low, C.K., Chen, T.Y., Rönnquist, R.: Automated test case generation for bdi agents. In: Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, vol. 2, pp. 311–332 (1999)
Padgham, L., Winikoff, M.: Developing Intelligent Agent Systems: A Practical Guide. John Wiley and Sons, Chichester (2004)
Poutakidis, D., Padgham, L., Winikoff, M.: Debugging multi-agent systems using design artifacts: the case of interaction protocols. In: Alonso, E., Kudenko, D., Kazakov, D. (eds.) Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2636, Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Poutakidis, D., Padgham, L., Winikoff, M.: An exploration of bugs and debugging in multi-agent systems. In: Zhong, N., Raś, Z.W., Tsumoto, S., Suzuki, E. (eds.) ISMIS 2003. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2871, Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Hoare, C.A.R.: Assertions: a personal perspective. Software pioneers: contributions to software engineering, 356–366 (2002)
Floyd, R.: Assigning meaning to programs. In: Mathematical Aspects of Computer Science, XIX American Mathematical Society, pp. 19–32 (1967)
Turing, A.M.: Checking a large routine. In: Report on a Conference on High Speed Automatic Calculating Machines, Cambridge University Mathematical Lab. (1949)
Meyer, B.: Object Oriented Software Construction. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1997)
Voas, J.: How assertions can increase test effectiveness. IEEE Software, 118–122 (March/April 1997)
Busetta, P., Rönnquist, R., Hodgson, A., Lucas, A.: Jack - intelligent agents – components for intelligent agents in java. Technical report, Agent Oriented Software Pty. Ltd. (1998)
Pokahr, A., Braubach, L., Lamersdorf, W.: Jadex: A bdi reasoning engine. In: Multi-Agent Programming. Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies, and Simulated Organizations, vol. 15, pp. 149–174. Springer, Heidelberg (2005), doi:10.1007/b137449
Ferber, J.: Multi-Agent Systems. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1999)
Braubach, L., Pokahr, A., Lamersdorf, W.: Jadex: A BDI Agent System Combining Middleware and Reasoning. In: Software Agent-Based Applications, Platforms and Development Kits, Birkhäuser, Basel (2005)
Parnas, D.L.: On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules. Commun. ACM 15, 1053–1058 (1972)
Kiczales, G., Lamping, J., Menhdhekar, A., Maeda, C., Lopes, C., Loingtier, J.M., Irwin, J.: Aspect-oriented programming. In: Aksit, M., Matsuoka, S. (eds.) ECOOP 1997. LNCS, vol. 1241, Springer, Heidelberg (1997)
Braubach, L., Pokahr, A., Lamersdorf, W.: Extending the capability concept for flexible BDI agent modularization. In: Proc. of PROMAS-2005 (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
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
Download citation
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
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)