Verification Of Interaction Protocols Research Articles

Modelling intelligent agents for autonomic computing in the PNagent framework

Petri nets have proven to be a valuable tool for modelling concurrent systems. As such, they should be suitable for modelling agent and multi-agent systems, as these are inherently concurrent. Nevertheless, there are not many systems that allow the modelling of the whole multi-agent system in Petri nets. The use of Petri nets is usually limited to subproblems such as the verification of interaction protocols. This paper describes the main concepts of PNagent – a tool for modelling Believe-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents using the formalism of Object-Oriented Petri Nets (OOPN). PNagent allows for developing, testing and running software agents in a consistent graphical environment. The framework is suitable for prototyping and experiments with both multi-agent applications and the particular agent architecture itself. At the same time, thanks to the formal nature of its underlying paradigm, it provides the means to verify an agent's properties. Thanks to its consistent environment and the high-level nature of the used formalism, the framework is also suitable for incorporating the ideas of autonomic computing.

Formalisation and verification of interaction protocols for business process integration: a Petri net approach

Interaction Protocols (IP) are specific, often standard, constraints on the behaviours of the autonomous agents in a multiagent system. Protocols are essential to the functioning of open business systems, such as those that arise in most interesting web applications. This paper presents a new approach for Business Process Integration (BPI) based on IP. It enables both integration and collaboration of autonomous and distributed business processes modules. We present a semantic formalisation of the IP notations used in our approach. The semantics and its application are described on the basis of translation rules to Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs) and the benefits of formalisation are shown.

Formal description and verification of MAS interaction protocols

Formal description and verification of interaction protocols is an important field of MAS. In this paper a calculus for describing interaction protocols of MAS is defined. The calculus is based on process algebra and is independent of any particular model of rational agency. This makes it applicable to verify the protocol of heterogeneous agent systems. With the formal semantics of calculus, some properties of session protocols, e.g. termination, deadlock, can be verified. The approach can avoid the problem of semantic verification, because the states of the protocol are defined in the protocol itself. The formal interaction protocol specifies the complex concurrent and asynchronous pattern of communication between agents and can be verified straightforward that whether an agent acts in accordance with the protocol or not.