The gamma model and its discipline of programming
Science of Computer Programming
Selected papers of the Second Workshop on Concurrency and compositionality
A calculus of mobile processes, I
Information and Computation
MadKit: a generic multi-agent platform
AGENTS '00 Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Autonomous agents
Journal of Computer and System Sciences
Automata, Languages, and Machines
Automata, Languages, and Machines
Formal Specification and Prototyping of Multi-agent Systems
ESAW '00 Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agent World: Revised Papers
FoSSaCS '98 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structure
The dMARS Architecture: A Specification of the Distributed Multi-Agent Reasoning System
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
Verification of NASA Emergent Systems
ICECCS '04 Proceedings of the Ninth IEEE International Conference on Engineering Complex Computer Systems Navigating Complexity in the e-Engineering Age
Commitments for Flexible Business Processes
AAMAS '04 Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 3
Properties of a Formal Method for Prediction of Emergent Behaviors in Swarm-Based Systems
SEFM '04 Proceedings of the Software Engineering and Formal Methods, Second International Conference
Multiagent systems engineering of organization-based multiagent systems
SELMAS '05 Proceedings of the fourth international workshop on Software engineering for large-scale multi-agent systems
P Systems with Mobile Membranes
Natural Computing: an international journal
Case studies for self-organization in computer science
Journal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal - Special issue: Nature-inspired applications and systems
Deterministic nonlinear modeling of ant algorithm with logistic multiagent system
Proceedings of the 6th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
Understanding organizational congruence: formal model and simulation framework
SpringSim '07 Proceedings of the 2007 spring simulation multiconference - Volume 2
Modeling decentralized organizational change in honeybee societies
ECAL'07 Proceedings of the 9th European conference on Advances in artificial life
OPERASCC: an instance of a formal framework for MAS modeling based on population P systems
WMC'07 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Membrane computing
A formal modelling framework for developing multi-agent systems with dynamic structure and behaviour
CEEMAS'05 Proceedings of the 4th international Central and Eastern European conference on Multi-Agent Systems and Applications
Specification of reconfigurable MAS: a hybrid formal approach
SETN'06 Proceedings of the 4th Helenic conference on Advances in Artificial Intelligence
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Swarm-based systems are a class of multi-agent systems (MAS) of particular interest because they exhibit emergent behaviour through self-organisation. They are biology-inspired but find themselves applicable to a wide range of domains, with some of them characterised as mission critical. It is therefore implied that the use of a formal framework and methods would facilitate modelling of a MAS in such a way that the final product is fully tested and safety properties are verified. One way to achieve this is by defining a new formalism to specify MAS, something which could precisely fit the purpose but requires significant period to formally prove the validation power of the method. The alternative is to use existing formal methods thus exploiting their legacy. In this paper, we follow the latter approach. We present OPERAS, an open framework that facilitates formal modelling of MAS through employing existing formal methods. We describe how a particular instance of this framework, namely OPERASXC, could integrate the most prominent characteristics of finite state machines and biological computation systems, such as X-machines and P Systems respectively. We demonstrate how the resulting method can be used to formally model a swarm system and discuss the flexibility and advantages of this approach.