Abstract. In open multi-agent systems agent interaction is usually ruled by public protocols defining the rules the agents should respect in message exchanging. The respect of such rules guarantees interoperability. Given two agents that agree on using a certain protocol for their interaction, a crucial issue (known as “a priori conformance test”) is verifying if their interaction policies, i.e. the programs that encode their communicative behavior, will actually produce interactions which are conformant to the agreed protocol. An issue that is not always made clear in the existing proposals for conformance tests is whether the test preserves agents’ capability of interacting, besides certifying the legality of their possible conversations. This work proposes an approach to the verification of a priori conformance, of an agent’s conversation policy to a protocol, which is based on the theory of formal languages. The conformance test is based on the acceptance of both the policy and the protocol by a special finite state automaton and it guarantees the interoperability of agents that are individually proved conformant. Many protocols used in multi-agent systems can be expressed as finite state automata, so this approach can be applied to a wide variety of cases with the proviso that both the protocol specification and the protocol implementation can be translated into finite state automata. In this sense the approach is general. Easy applicability to the case when a logic-based language is used to implement the policies is shown by means of a concrete example, in which the language DyLOG, based on computational logic, is used. 1

Abstract. Communication plays a fundamental role in multi-agents systems. One of the main issues in the design of agent interaction protocols is the verification that a given protocol implementation is “conformant” w.r.t. the abstract specification of it. In this work we tackle those aspects of the conformance verification issue, that regard the dependence/independence of conformance from the agent private state. More specifically we introduce three notions of conformance with different levels of abstraction from the agent knowledge and the relations between each other, and apply them to the case of logic, individual agents, set in a multi-agent framework. We do this by working on a specific agent programming language, DyLOG, and by focussing on interaction protocol specifications described by AUML sequence diagrams. By showing how AUML sequence diagrams can be translated into regular grammars and, then, by interpreting the problem of conformance as a problem of language inclusion, we describe a method for automatically verifying a form of “structural ” conformance; such a process is shown to be decidable and an upper bound to its complexity is given. 1

Abstract. Engineering systems of heterogeneous agents is a difficult task; one of the ways for achieving the successful industrial deployment of agent technology is the development of engineering tools that support the developer in all the steps of design and implementation. In this work we focus on the problem of supporting the design of agent interaction protocols by carrying out a methodological integration of the MAS prototyping environment DCaseLP with the agent programming language DyLOG for reasoning about action and change. 1

Abstract. The paper presents an approach to reasoning about Web services in a temporal action theory. Web services are described by specifying their interaction protocols in an action theory based on a dynamic, linear-time, temporal logic. The proposed framework is based on a social approach to agent communication, where the effects of communicative actions allow changes in the social state, and interaction protocols are defined in terms of the creation and fulfillment of commitments and permissions among the agents. We show how to introduce epistemic operators in the action theory to deal with incomplete information, and we address the problem of verifying properties of Web services, as well as the problem of reasoning about the composition of Web services. 1

Policy-based access control is nowadays a common mechanism to protect data in distributed environments. However, the word policy has been given many different meanings and is used in different contexts. This chapter gives an overview of the existing approaches to logic- and rule-based system behavior specification in the light of the peculiar needs of business and security rules.

Abstract This paper is concerned with the problem of obtaining predictable interactions between groups of agents in open environments when individual agents do not expose their bdi logic. The most popular approaches to this in practise have been to model interaction protocols and to model the deontic constraints imposed by individual agents. Both of these approaches are appropriate and necessary but their combination creates the practical problem of ensuring that interaction protocols are meshed with agents that possess compatible deontic constraints. This is essentially an issue of property checking dynamically at run-time. We show how model checking can be applied to this problem.

Agents Interaction Protocols (AIPs) play a crucial role in multi-agents systems development. They allow specifying sequences of messages between agents. Major proposed protocols suffer from many weaknesses. We present, in this paper, a formal approach supporting the verification of agents ’ interaction protocols described by using AUML formalism. The considered AUML diagrams are formally translated into Maude specifications. Based on rewriting logic, the formal and object-oriented language Maude offers an interesting way for concurrent systems formal specification and programming. The Maude environment integrates a model-checker based on Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) supporting formal verification of distributed systems. The proposed approach essentially allows: (1) translating the description of agents ’ interactions, specified using AUML formalism, in a Maude specification and, (2) applying the model-checking techniques supported by Maude to verify some properties of the described system. A case study is presented to illustrate our approach.