Model Checking Auctions as Artifact Systems: Decidability via Finite Abstraction

The formal verification of auctions has recently received considerable attention in the AI and logic community. We tackle this problem by adopting methodologies and techniques originally developed for Artifact Systems, a novel paradigm in Service Oriented Computing. Specifically, we introduce a typed version of artifact-centric multi-agent systems (AC-MAS), a multi-agent setting for Artifact Systems, and consider the model checking problem against typed first-order temporal epistemic specifications. Notably, this formal framework is expressive enough to capture a relevant class of auctions: parallel English (ascending bid) auctions. We prove decidability of the model checking problem for AC-MAS via finite abstraction. In particular, we put forward a methodology to formally verify interesting properties of auctions.

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