Toward Testing Self-organizations in Multi-Embedded-Agent Systems

This paper presents a testing approach for validating global adaptation in multi-embedded-agent systems. Those systems are gaining increasing attention due to their high adaptability and resilience. They differ from software multi-agent systems because embedded agents have additional constraints, like energy management that software agents don’t. Those constraints and other specificities, like the tight link with the physical environment, require the use of specific methods and tools for testing these systems. The proposed approach aims at validating at run-time the adaptation of those systems when the entities composing them, the agents, are able to change their global behaviors with self-organization processes. Self-organization processes are not specific to multi-agent systems but in their case, they allow agents to change their organization, i.e. their way of interacting, at runtime. The proposed approach and tool are designed to support lifelong monitoring of multi-embedded-agent systems. In such systems, agents have self-organization behaviors resulting in complex and ever adapting systems, which are challenging to test and monitor.