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Modeling and verifying multi-agent behaviors using predicate/transition nets

Published: 15 July 2002 Publication History

Abstract

In a multi-agent system, how agents accomplish a goal task is usually specified by multi-agent plans built from basic actions (e.g. operators) of which the agents are capable. A critical problem with such an approach is how can the designer make sure the plans are reliable. To tackle this problem, this paper presents a formal approach for modeling and analyzing multi-agent behaviors using Predicate/Transition (PrT) nets, a high-level formalism of Petri nets. We construct a multi-agent model by representing agent capabilities as transitions. To verify a multi-agent PrT model, we adapt the planning graphs as a compact structure for the reachability analysis. We also demonstrate that, based on the PrT model, whether parallel actions specified in multi-agent plans can be executed in parallel and whether the plans guarantee the achievement of the goal can be verified by analyzing the dependency relations among the transitions.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
SEKE '02: Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Software engineering and knowledge engineering
July 2002
859 pages
ISBN:1581135564
DOI:10.1145/568760
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 July 2002

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Author Tags

  1. formal methods
  2. multiagent systems
  3. petri nets
  4. predicate/transition nets
  5. verification

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  • (2018)Formal Verification of ALICA Multi-agent Plans Using Model CheckingProceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Information and Communication Technology10.1145/3287921.3287947(351-358)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2018
  • (2018)Agent systems verificationApplied Intelligence10.1007/s10489-017-1112-z48:5(1251-1274)Online publication date: 1-May-2018
  • (2017)Interacting with team oriented plans in multi-robot systemsAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/s10458-016-9344-631:2(332-361)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2017
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