Study of Multi-agent Testing Techniques and Future Research Direction
Asif Irshad Khan, Abdullah Maresh Ali · 2012
Abstract — Multi Agents System (MAS) is seen as the necessary software paradigm for realizing massive open distributed systems, testing the MAS evolves challenging task, there are several reasons for the MAS testing to be challenging. In this paper we mainly reported state of art Multiagent based testing techniques and its challenges and listed, some future research direction for testing Multi Agents System (MAS) are also highlighted in this paper. Index Terms — Agents, Multi-agent Systems , Unit Testing, Agent-Oriented Software Engineering , Test challenges , Model Driven Architecture, debugging ———————————————————— 1 Introduction N recent years, agent-based systems have received considerable attention in both academics and industry. Agents are seen as the necessary software paradigm for realizing massive open distributed systems. A software agent is a computer program that perform tasks in pursuit of a goal in a dynamic environment on behalf of another entity (human or computational), possibly over an extended period of time, without continuous direct supervision or control, and exhibits a significant degree of flexibility and even creativity in how it seeks to transform goals into action tasks. A software agent is similar to a robot, but operates in cyberspace, on a computer network. Macal and North [1] believe that ‗‗There is no universal agreement on the precise definition of the term ‗agent‘, although definitions tend to agree on more points than they disagree‘‘. It seems very complicated to extract agent characteristics from the literature in a consistent and constant perspective, because they are utilized in different ways [2]. Brawshaw [3] states the following definition: Software agent is a software entity that functions continuously and autonomously in a particular environment, which may contain another agents and processes. For instance, a number of experts take into consideration any sort of independent components (e.g. software, individual, etc.) an agent, while some others believe that a component‘s behavior needs to be adaptive in order to be considered an agent, where the term agent is reserved for components that can learn through their environments and change their behaviors accordingly [1]. Nevertheless, several common features exist for most agents [5] & [6]—extended and explained further by [6], [8] and [9]. The paper is organized as follows: sections II cover Agent and Multiagent concepts and its feature Section III Software Verification, Testing and Debugging techniques Section IV describes related work Section V listed Challenges in testing of Multi Agents System (MAS) VI some research directions for testing of Multi Agents System (MAS) and Section VII conclusion and future work.