MV-Checker: A software tool for multi-valued model checking intelligent applications with trust and commitment

Abstract

Intelligent applications are highly susceptible to uncertainty and inconsistency due to the intense and intricate interactions among their autonomous components (or agents), making their verification theoretically and practically challenging. This paper presents the design and implementation of a new open-source and scalable software tool for modeling and verifying intelligent applications with commitment and trust protocols under both uncertainty and inconsistency settings, using reduction-based multi-valued model checking techniques. The proposed tool is equipped with original and novel algorithms that transform our logics of multi-valued commitment (mv-CTLC) and multi-value trust (mv-TCTL) that we recently introduced to their classical two-valued commitment (CTLC) and trust (TCTL) logic versions as well as to Computational Tree Logic (CTL). Moreover, the tool transforms the mv-CTL to CTL, and it is applicable for the classical model checking by transforming the classical logics of trust and commitment to CTL. To demonstrate the practicality and applicability of the proposed tool in real settings, we present and report experimental results over two blockchain-based applications in the healthcare domain. Finally, we provide discussions and comparisons between the proposed approaches regarding scalability and efficiency. Moreover, we provide packages of more than 11 experiments, including the ones we conduct in this paper and enhanced experiments from previous works. Our findings ensure that the proposed approaches and the software tool that implements them are highly efficient and scalable, giving accurate results under varying conditions.