Abstract
In Multi-Agent System (MAS), developers concentrate on creating design models and evolving them, from higher level models to lower level models, in several steps. Considerable part of MAS implementations is automatically produced from the design models. If a design model contains faults, they are passed to the generated implementations. Practical model validation techniques are required to discover and delete faults in abstract design models. We introduce a formal approach for agent design testing. It specifies a testing process that complements Multi-agent Systems Engineering (MaSE) methodology and strengthens the mutual relationship between UML and MAS. Besides, it defines a structured and comprehensive testing process for engineering software agents at the design level by providing a systematic way of converting the MAS design models to UML design diagram. Petri Net (PN) diagram is generated from the UML models to simulate the behavior of an agent. Because Petri Nets (PNs) are formal models, their analysis techniques can be applied to automatic agent behavioral testing.
Highlights
The growing requests for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in the software application have led to the elaboration of various Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodologies to support the development of agent-based applications
Thereby, transformation models that fill the gap between the AOSE design/ analysis artifacts and the Unified Modeling Languages (UML)-based new testing techniques dealing with their particular nature
Testing and monitoring MAS to eliminate the risk of unwanted emergent behaviors is an important precondition for introducing MAS to the main stream of commercial software
Summary
The growing requests for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in the software application have led to the elaboration of various Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodologies to support the development of agent-based applications. A usual AOSE methodology such as MaSE (Bergenti et al, 2004; DeLoach, 2009) presents diverse new abstractions and design concepts to software development in comparison with regular model-based approaches such as UML. This makes the deployment of UML-based testing tools for checking the internal behavior of MAS difficult and sometimes impossible. Zina Houhamdi and Belkacem Athamena / American Journal of Applied Sciences 9 (11) (2012) 1876-1883 the UML-based testing and supervising tools to test and check the internal behavior of the developed MAS before delivering it as commercial software
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