Tools for analyzing intelligent agent systems

Abstract

When developing sophisticated multi-agent systems whose behaviors include collaboration, negotiation, and conflict resolution, analyzing and (empirically) verifying agent system behavior is a challenging task. To aid the developer in such tasks, this paper presents an approach that combines two software engineering tools - the Tracer Tool and the TTL Checker, which together record agent activities as execution traces and verify that the traces satisfy specified properties. The objective of the combined tool is to aid the user in redesigning, debugging, and maintaining the agent system. The Tracer Tool ensures that the user's comprehension of the system behavior is accurate with respect to the execution traces and provides explanations of anomalous behavior, which can be detected as a failed behavioral property by the TTL Checker. The integrated approach has been applied to an agent-based system designed to coordinate unmanned aerial vehicles.