Using Bounded Fairness to Specify and Verify Ordered Asynchronous Multi-agent Systems

Asynchronous multi-agent systems (AMAS) are multi-agent systems with asynchronous updates and communications. They are often designed from the point of view of local computations and the interactions of autonomous agents. However, often some functionality of the system is proposed from the global point of view. It is not always possible to verify such global functionality under total, random, asynchrony and such asynchrony is unrealistic in most cases. Several non-functional factors such as the variance of local clocks of the agents and the message delays play essential roles in implementing ordered asynchrony in practice and should be taken into account in the specification and verification. In this paper, we present a specification framework for AMAS using Object-Z and bounded fairness constraints. The bounded fairness constraints are used to specify required non-functional factors. We demonstrate that under these constraints the system's functionality can be guaranteed by the local behaviour of the agents.