Abstract

the semantics of an agent communication language has become increasingly important as agent technology makes its transition from the research laboratory to eld-tested applications. In this paper, we show how model checking techniques can be applied to this problem. Model checking is a technique developed within the formal methods community for automatically verifying that nite-state concurrent systems implement temporal logic speci cations. We rst describe a variation of the MABLE multiagent bdi programming language, which permits the semantics (pre- and postconditions) of acl performatives to be de ned separately from a system where these semantics are used. We then show how assertions de ning compliance to the semantics of an acl can be captured as claims about MABLE agents, expressed using MABLE's associated assertion language. In this way, compliance to acl semantics reduces to a conventional model checking problem. We illustrate our approach with a number of short case studies.

Citations