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Detection of Asynchronous Concatenation Emergent Behaviour in Multi-Agent Systems

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Agents and Multi-Agent Systems: Technologies and Applications 2021

Abstract

Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) use collective agents to attain a common goal. However, the implementation of MASs may present a potential for failure caused by the system’s unexpected behaviours, known as Emergent Behaviours (EBs) or Implied Scenarios (ISs). The early assessment of these behaviours in the development life cycle can reduce the cost, effort and maintenance time and contribute to the sustainability of the process. To detect EBs implied by the Asynchronous Concatenation (AC) of scenarios, we verify that the agents’ interactions are compliant with the system specifications. The proposed methodology allows automatic detection of EBs by the direct analysis of scenario-based specifications. Moreover, this methodology allows the anticipated correction of EBs and can potentially support the development of MASs. We studied the validity of this methodology by adopting a formerly published model and a pattern mining technique to prove the existence of the EBs detected by our approach in the runtime. The results show that our methodology outperforms those in previous related works in the detection of AC EBs.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Due to the space limit, end-if and end-for statements are removed from the pseudo-code.

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Correspondence to Anja Slama .

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Slama, A., Abad, Z.S.H., Far, B. (2021). Detection of Asynchronous Concatenation Emergent Behaviour in Multi-Agent Systems. In: Jezic, G., Chen-Burger, J., Kusek, M., Sperka, R., Howlett, R.J., Jain, L.C. (eds) Agents and Multi-Agent Systems: Technologies and Applications 2021. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol 241. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2994-5_7

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