Formal Methods in Agent-Oriented Design and Analysis
Haiping Xu, Sol M. Shatz · 2001
Intelligent agents are becoming one of the most important topics in distributed and autonomous decentralized systems, and there are increasing attempts to use agent technologies to develop large-scale commercial and industrial software systems. The complexity of such systems suggests a pressing need for system modeling techniques to support reliable, maintainable and extensible design. The mission of this proposed chapter is to describe an approach for using a formal model in the design of agents. The approach is based on G-nets, which are a type of Petri net defined to support system modeling in terms of a set of independent and loosely-coupled modules. We customize the basic G-net model to define a so-called “agent-oriented G-net ” that can serve as a generic model for agent design. To illustrate our formal modeling technique for multi-agent systems, an example of an agent family in electronic commerce is provided. Finally, we discuss our future research plans. 1. An Introduction to Formal Methods for Agent Design This section of the proposed chapter will introduce the use of formal methods for agent design and highlight related works. The following is a condensed version of this section. Intelligent agents can be considered as active objects, or objects with mental states [1]. However, intelligent agents are quite different from objects in terms of communication mechanisms and decision-making capabilities. As a result, the