Verification column

Abstract

The technical column on verification presents an invited contribution by Dr. Franco Raimondi (Department of Computer Science in Middlesex University, London) titled "Using multi-agent systems to go beyond temporal patterns verification" in the April issue of the SIGLOG newsletter. This article presents an introduction to epistemic logic and verification of epistemic properties. Epistemology is defined as the the study of the nature and scope of knowledge and justified belief. It analyzes the nature of knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth, belief, and justification . Epistemic properties has been applied to philophical reasonings; more recently, it has been applied to state properties of social interactions, artificial intelligence applications, security application, multi-agent systems. The article presents extension of the temporal logics to support epistemetic properites and verification of it as well. This article I believe is will be of interest to people in the logic community as well as the verification community. There has been a lot of work in the past twenty years in th field of verification specifically model checking of multi-agent systems; this article presents an overview of the MCMAS model checker. Thank you Dr. Raimondi for this insightful article.