Michael Luck
King's College London, Informatics, Faculty Member
- King's College London, Computer Science, Faculty Memberadd
Due to their immense complexity, large-scale multiagent systems are often unamenable to exhaustive formal verification. Statistical approaches that focus on the verification of individual traces can provide an interesting alternative.... more
Due to their immense complexity, large-scale multiagent systems are often unamenable to exhaustive formal verification. Statistical approaches that focus on the verification of individual traces can provide an interesting alternative. However, due to its focus on finite execution paths, trace-based verification is inherently limited to certain types of correctness properties. We show how, by combining sampling with the idea of trace fragmentation, statistical model checking can be used to answer interesting quantitative correctness properties about multiagent systems on different observational levels. We illustrate the idea with a simple case study from the area of swarm robotics.
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Software architectures that contain many dynamically interacting components, each with its own thread of control, engaging in complex coordination protocols, are difficult to correctly and efficiently engineer. Agent-oriented modelling... more
Software architectures that contain many dynamically interacting components, each with its own thread of control, engaging in complex coordination protocols, are difficult to correctly and efficiently engineer. Agent-oriented modelling techniques are important for the design and development of such applications. This book provides a diverse and interesting overview of the work that is currently being undertaken by a growing number of researchers in the area of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. The papers represent a state-of-the- ...
Seleccionar todos Título: Retos de la Tecnología de Agentes en el horizonte del año 2010 Autores: Luck, Michael; McBurney, Peter Revista: Novática: Revista de la Asociación de Técnicos de Informática, 2004 JUL-AGO; (170) Página(s): 6-10... more
Seleccionar todos Título: Retos de la Tecnología de Agentes en el horizonte del año 2010 Autores: Luck, Michael; McBurney, Peter Revista: Novática: Revista de la Asociación de Técnicos de Informática, 2004 JUL-AGO; (170) Página(s): 6-10 ISSN: 02112124. ...
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Intuitively, autonomous agents are hard to test. Their autonomy and their flexible, context-aware behaviour implies unpredictability, and their social ability intuitively leads to unpredictable emergent behaviour. On the other hand,... more
Intuitively, autonomous agents are hard to test. Their autonomy and their flexible, context-aware behaviour implies unpredictability, and their social ability intuitively leads to unpredictable emergent behaviour. On the other hand, software agents are programs just like those designed and developed in an object-oriented, procedural fashion, or under any other approach, and just because something is intuitive does not mean it is necessarily correct.
With the recent rapid growth of interest in Multi-Agent Systems, both in artificial intelligence and software engineering, has come an associated difficulty concerning basic terms and concepts. In particular, the terms agency and autonomy... more
With the recent rapid growth of interest in Multi-Agent Systems, both in artificial intelligence and software engineering, has come an associated difficulty concerning basic terms and concepts. In particular, the terms agency and autonomy are used with increasing frequency to denote different notions with different connotations. In this paper we lay the foundations for a principled theory of agency and autonomy, and specify the relationship between them. Using the Z specification language, we describe a three-tiered hierarchy ...
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Agent-based simulation has shown great success for the study of complex adaptive systems and could in many areas show advantages over traditional analytical methods. Due to their internal complexity, however, agent-based simulations are... more
Agent-based simulation has shown great success for the study of complex adaptive systems and could in many areas show advantages over traditional analytical methods. Due to their internal complexity, however, agent-based simulations are notoriously difficult to verify and validate. This paper presents MC2MABS, a Monte Carlo Model Checker for Multiagent-Based Simulations. It incorporates the idea of statistical runtime verification, a combination of statistical model checking and runtime verification, and is tailored to the approximate verification of complex agent-based simulations. We provide a description of the underlying theory together with design decisions, an architectural overview, and implementation details. The performance of MC2MABS in terms of both runtime consumption and memory allocation is evaluated against a set of example properties.
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Abstract. A significant class of agent architectures designed for operation in a multi-agent world choose their next actions or plans based on a limited analysis; they ignore considerations of the multi-agent world they inhabit, and the... more
Abstract. A significant class of agent architectures designed for operation in a multi-agent world choose their next actions or plans based on a limited analysis; they ignore considerations of the multi-agent world they inhabit, and the inter-agent relationship that might influence their choice of action. This paper addresses that problem, and focuses on the integration of BDI-like agent architectures with computational notions of norms and dependence to arrive at a computational multi-agent organisation model. We describe ...
There is a growing body of work that concentrates on theoretical aspects of agents and multi-agent systems, and a complementary body of work concerned with building practical systems. However, the two have typically been unrelated. This... more
There is a growing body of work that concentrates on theoretical aspects of agents and multi-agent systems, and a complementary body of work concerned with building practical systems. However, the two have typically been unrelated. This gap between the theory and practice of intelligent agents has only relatively recently begun to be addressed. In this paper we describe the construction of an agent simulation environment that is based strongly on a formal theory of agent systems, but which is intended to serve in exactly this way as a basis for practical development. The paper briefly introduces the theory, then describes the system and the simple reactive agents built with it, but most importantly shows how it reflects the theoretical framework and how it facilitates incremental agent design and implementation. Using this example as a case-study, some possibilities for a methodology for the development of agent systems are discussed.
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The Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) is the best established agent architecture currently available. It has been deployed in many major industrial applications, ranging from fault diagnosis on the space shuttle to air traffic management... more
The Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) is the best established agent architecture currently available. It has been deployed in many major industrial applications, ranging from fault diagnosis on the space shuttle to air traffic management and business process control. The theory of PRS-like systems has also been widely studied: within the intelligent agents research community, the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model of practical reasoning that underpins PRS is arguably the dominant force in the theoretical foundations of rational agency. Despite the interest in PRS and BDI agents, no complete attempt has yet been made to precisely specify the behaviour of real PRS systems. This has led to the development of a range of systems that claim to conform to the PRS model, but which differ from it in many important respects. Our aim in this paper is to rectify this omission. We provide an abstract formal model of an idealised dMARS system (the most recent implementation of the PRS architecture), which precisely defines the key data structures present within the architecture and the operations that manipulate these structures. We focus in particular on dMARS plans, since these are the key tool for programming dMARS agents. The specification we present will enable other implementations of PRS to be easily developed, and will serve as a benchmark against which future architectural enhancements can be evaluated.
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Abstract. The types of relationships that arise between interacting agents in a multi-agent system can greatly influence the effectiveness of the entire system. However, the behaviour of agents cannot always be anticipated, especially... more
Abstract. The types of relationships that arise between interacting agents in a multi-agent system can greatly influence the effectiveness of the entire system. However, the behaviour of agents cannot always be anticipated, especially when dealing with open and complex systems. Such systems must incorporate relationship management mechanisms that attempt to guide the behaviour of agents towards desired outcomes. To effectively design such mechanisms, we must first be able to identify the types of relationships that may emerge ...
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Negotiation is key to resolving conflicts, allocating resources and establishing cooperation in systems of self-interested agents. Often, an agent may have to select between different potential negotiation partners, and identifying which... more
Negotiation is key to resolving conflicts, allocating resources and establishing cooperation in systems of self-interested agents. Often, an agent may have to select between different potential negotiation partners, and identifying which offers the best chance of a successful negotiation is a challenging task. However, poor selection of partners can result in failure or in inefficient outcomes. To that end, this paper describes a motivation-based mechanism to evaluate and select between negotiation candidates. This is ...
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With the recent rapid growth of interest in Multi-Agent Systems, both in artificial intelligence and software engineering has come an associated difficulty concerning basic terms and concepts. In particular, the terms agency and autonomy... more
With the recent rapid growth of interest in Multi-Agent Systems, both in artificial intelligence and software engineering has come an associated difficulty concerning basic terms and concepts. In particular, the terms agency and autonomy are used with increasing frequency to denote different notions with different connotations. In this paper we lay the foundations for a principled theory of agency and autonomy, and specify the relationship between them. Using the Z specification language, we describe a three-tiered hierarchy comprising ...
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If agents are able to exploit the resources available in a multi-agent domain they must make use of other agents to help them in their tasks. In order to do this it is important that we first of all have an understanding of agency, and... more
If agents are able to exploit the resources available in a multi-agent domain they must make use of other agents to help them in their tasks. In order to do this it is important that we first of all have an understanding of agency, and then of how goals are generated and subsequently adopted by other agents. In this paper we build upon a three-tiered hierarchy which has been constructed to define objects, agents and autonomous agents, where all autonomous agents are agents, and all agents are objects. In this hierarchy, ...
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Abstract. The types of relationships that arise between interacting agents in a multi-agent system can greatly influence the effectiveness of the entire system. However, the behaviour of agents cannot always be anticipated, especially... more
Abstract. The types of relationships that arise between interacting agents in a multi-agent system can greatly influence the effectiveness of the entire system. However, the behaviour of agents cannot always be anticipated, especially when dealing with open and complex systems. Such systems must incorporate relationship management mechanisms that attempt to guide the behaviour of agents towards desired outcomes. To effectively design such mechanisms, we must first be able to identify the types of relationships that may emerge ...
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In order to cooperate effectively with its peers, an agent must manipulate representations of the social structures in which it plays a part. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mathematical and computational aspects of this... more
In order to cooperate effectively with its peers, an agent must manipulate representations of the social structures in which it plays a part. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mathematical and computational aspects of this social reasoning process. We begin by defining an abstract representation of cooperation structures, wherein agents cooperate to achieve goals on each other's behalf. We then investigate the question of whether or not cooperation is feasible with respect to an agent's goal, and we show that ...
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Research Interests: Management, Bioinformatics, Grid Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Information Management, and 25 moreSemantics, Stem Cells, Data Analysis, Computational Biology, Agent Based Simulation, Systems Biology, Agent Based, Biology, Web Services, Semantic Web, System Biology, Multi Agent System, Simulation, Software, Humans, Modelling and simulation, Multi Agent Systems, Agent Technology, Web Service, Biological systems, Protein Secondary Structure Prediction, Computational Grid, System Modelling, Biochemistry and cell biology, and Biological System
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This paper focusses on the usefulness of approximate probabilistic model checking for the internal and external validation of large-scale agent-based simulations. We describe the translation of typical validation criteria into a variant... more
This paper focusses on the usefulness of approximate probabilistic model checking for the internal and external validation of large-scale agent-based simulations. We describe the translation of typical validation criteria into a variant of linear time logic. We further present a prototypical version of a highly customisable approximate model checker
which we used in a range of experiments to verify properties of large scale models whose complexity prevents them from being amenable to conventional explicit or symbolic model checking.
which we used in a range of experiments to verify properties of large scale models whose complexity prevents them from being amenable to conventional explicit or symbolic model checking.
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Due to their internal complexity, agent-based simulations are rarely amenable to conventional formal verification. With its focus on individual traces, runtime verification represents an interesting alternative for correctness assessment.... more
Due to their internal complexity, agent-based simulations are rarely amenable to conventional formal verification. With its focus on individual traces, runtime verification represents an interesting alternative for correctness assessment. Here, execution traces produced by the running system are observed by a monitor and checked for correctness on-the-fly. If the truth or falsity of a given property cannot be determined at time t, then the monitor creates an obligation that the current trace needs to satisfy at time t+1 in order for the whole property to become true.
With different observational levels, traces produced by agent-based simulations have an inherently hierarchical nature which complicates the structure and manipulation of obligations significantly. However, it turns out that this problem is general enough to be dealt with in an abstract, language-independent way.
In this paper, we provide a general framework for the monitoring of hierarchical traces. It introduces different types of obligations and appropriate manipulation procedures along with minimal requirements that a property specification language needs to satisfy in order to be monitorable. We provide a full formalisation of the framework and an example implementation of a subset in Haskell.
With different observational levels, traces produced by agent-based simulations have an inherently hierarchical nature which complicates the structure and manipulation of obligations significantly. However, it turns out that this problem is general enough to be dealt with in an abstract, language-independent way.
In this paper, we provide a general framework for the monitoring of hierarchical traces. It introduces different types of obligations and appropriate manipulation procedures along with minimal requirements that a property specification language needs to satisfy in order to be monitorable. We provide a full formalisation of the framework and an example implementation of a subset in Haskell.
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Swarm-based systems, i.e. systems comprising multiple simple, autonomous and interacting components, have become increasingly important. With their decentralised architecture, their ability to self-organise and to exhibit complex emergent... more
Swarm-based systems, i.e. systems comprising multiple simple, autonomous and interacting components, have become increasingly important. With their decentralised architecture, their ability to self-organise and to exhibit complex emergent behaviour, good scalability and support for inherent fault tolerance due to a high level of redundancy, they offer characteristics which are particularly interesting for the construction of safety-critical systems. At the same time, swarms are notoriously difficult to engineer, to understand and to control. Emergent phenomena are, by definition, irreducible to the properties of the constituents which severely constrains predictability. Especially in safety -critical areas, however, a clear understanding of the future dynamics of the system is indispensable. In this paper we show how agent-based simulation in combination with statistical verification can help to understand and quantify the likelihood of emergent swarm behaviours on different observational levels. We illustrate the idea with a simple case study from the area of swarm robotics.
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Agent-based simulation has shown great success for the study of complex adaptive systems and could in many areas show advantages over traditional analytical methods. Due to their internal complexity, however, agent-based simulations are... more
Agent-based simulation has shown great success for the study of complex adaptive systems and could in many areas show advantages over traditional analytical methods. Due to their internal complexity, however, agent-based simulations are notoriously difficult to verify and validate.
This paper presents MC2MABS, a Monte Carlo Model Checker for Multiagent-Based Simulations. It incorporates the idea of statistical runtime verification, a combination of statistical model checking and runtime verification, and is tailored to the approximate verification of large-scale agent-based simulations. We provide a description of the underlying theory together with design decisions, an architectural overview, and implementation details. The performance of MC2MABS in terms of both runtime consumption and memory allocation is evaluated against a set of example properties.
This paper presents MC2MABS, a Monte Carlo Model Checker for Multiagent-Based Simulations. It incorporates the idea of statistical runtime verification, a combination of statistical model checking and runtime verification, and is tailored to the approximate verification of large-scale agent-based simulations. We provide a description of the underlying theory together with design decisions, an architectural overview, and implementation details. The performance of MC2MABS in terms of both runtime consumption and memory allocation is evaluated against a set of example properties.