Validation of BDI agents

  • Authors:

  • Jan Sudeikat;Lars Braubach;Alexander Pokahr;Winfried Lamersdorf;Wolfgang Renz

  • Affiliations:

  • Distributed Systems and Information Systems, Computer Science Dept., Univ. of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany and Multimedia Systems Laboratory, Dept. of Information and Electrical Eng., Hamburg Univ. o ...;Distributed Systems and Information Systems, Computer Science Department, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany;Distributed Systems and Information Systems, Computer Science Department, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany;Distributed Systems and Information Systems, Computer Science Department, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany;Multimedia Systems Laboratory, Department of Information and Electrical Engineering, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg, Germany

  • Venue:
  • ProMAS'06 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Programming multi-agent systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Testing and Debugging multi-agent systems (MAS) - which are inherently concurrent and distributed - is a challenging task. While complex application scenarios demand intelligent entities with autonomous reasoning capabilities, the applied reasoning mechanisms impair current approaches to validate MAS implementations. Reactive planning systems, namely the well-known Belief Desire Intention (BDI) architecture, have been successfully applied to implement these intelligent entities by means of goal directed agents. Despite testing and debugging, used to validate whether implementations behave as intended, are crucial to serious development efforts, only minor attention has been payed to corresponding tool support and testing procedures for BDI-based MAS. In this paper, we examine how the reasoning mechanism inside agent implementations can be checked and how static analysis of agent declarations can be used to visualize and check the overall communication structure in closed MAS. We present corresponding tool support, which relies on the definition of crosscutting concerns in BDI agents and enables both approaches to the Jadex Agent Platform.