Conformance testing of BDI properties in agent-based software

Abstract

Agent-based software engineering combines the strengths of agent theory with the practical software engineering methods for developing large intelligent systems. Designing and implementing agent-based systems are complicated tasks because the agent's BDI characteristics (beliefs, desires, intentions) when codified in the design/implementation as software characteristics may have acquired different connotations. Consequently testing the reliability of the implementation is equally hard. It is necessary to choose an agent's software abstraction that has a minimal deviation from the BDI agent concept, and use it as a formal basis to test an implementation. This paper proposes one such method for conformance testing of BDI properties in an agent-based system.