Coverage: verifying multiple-agent knowledge-based systems

摘要

The increasing development of distributed knowledge-based systems based upon the multiple-agent paradigm demands techniques for the verification of these systems. As a minimum requirement, it is necessary to verify that the individual agents are capable of fulfilling their advertised capabilities, and that the whole group of agent forms a complete and coherent team. Anomaly detection, as performed by the cover tool, has proven to be a useful method for verifying logical properties of stand-alone knowledge-based systems. This article describes the coverage tool—an extension of cover designed to perform anomaly detection on multiple-agent systems. Coverage checks a multiple-agent system at several levels to verify that the system forms a coherent and complete team. The article includes a running example of a multiple-agent system verified using coverage.