Compositional Verification of a Multi-Agent System for One-to-Many Negotiation

  • Authors:

  • Frances M. T. Brazier;Frank Cornelissen;Rune Gustavsson;Catholijn M. Jonker;Olle Lindeberg;Bianca Polak;Jan Treur

  • Affiliations:

  • Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Department of Artificial Intelligence, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands. frances@cs.vu.nl http://www.cs.vu.nl~francesRune.Gustavsson@ide.hk-r.se http://www.ipd.bth.se;Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Department of Artificial Intelligence, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands. jonker@cs.vu.nl http://www.cs.vu.nl~jonker;University of Karlskrona/Ronneby (HK/R), Department of Computer Science. Olle.Lindeberg@bth.se http://www.ipd.bth.se;Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Department of Artificial Intelligence, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands;Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Department of Artificial Intelligence, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands. treur@cs.vu.nl http://www.cs.vu.nl~treur

  • Venue:
  • Applied Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Verification of multi-agent systems hardly occurs in design practice. One of the difficulties is that required properties for a multi-agent system usually refer to multi-agent behaviour which has nontrivial dynamics. To constrain these multi-agent behavioural dynamics, often a form of organisational structure is used, for example, for negotiating agents, by following strict protocols. The claim is that these negotiation protocols entail a structured process that is manageable with respect to analysis, design and execution of such a multi-agent system. In this paper this is shown by a case study: verification of a multi-agent system for one-to-many negotiation in the domain of load balancing of electricity use. A compositional verification method for multi-agent systems is applied that allows to (1) logically relate dynamic properties of the multi-agent system as a whole to dynamic properties of agents, and (2) logically relate dynamic properties of agents to properties of their subcomponents. Given that properties of these subcomponents can be verified by more standard methods, these logical relationships provide proofs of the dynamic properties of the multi-agent system as a whole.