Formalization and verification of interaction protocols

  • Authors:
  • Federico Chesani

  • Affiliations:
  • DEIS, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

  • Venue:
  • ICLP'05 Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Logic Programming
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

In recent years, the study of protocols and their properties has been one of the most investigated issues in distributed and multi-process systems research, and they are indeed one of the key component of Multi-Agent Systems. Several formal languages for defining protocols and properties have been proposed within different research communities. Some of the most common objectives of such languages include the ability to: formalize the protocols in an easy and clear way for human users; define the protocols abstracting away from the internal architecture of the participating peers; be able to specify and investigate properties, and help the implementation of the peers. Most of the current research on protocols falls into one of the following four main areas of interest: protocol formalization, where languages for specifying protocol has been intensively studied not only in MAS research [3,5,9], but also in the broader community of distributed and multi-process systems [6]; standardization, aimed at guaranteeing interoperability between heterogeneous agents in open computing environment [2,5]; protocol properties, where tools for proving properties are of utmost importance in the MAS community [4] and in the security protocols community [1]; and finally specific application domain protocols, where argumentation and negotiation are examples of domains where the study of protocols is driven by the need to address specific features [8].