Validation of Multiagent Systems by Symbolic Model Checking

Multiagent Systems are increasingly complex, and the problem of their verification and validation is acquiring increasing importance. In this paper we show how a well known and effective verification technique, symbolic model checking, can be generalized to deal with knowldge-level properties of multi-agent systems. The approach is fully amenable to the reuse of data structures used in symbolic model checking, Binary Decision Diagrams in particular, to deal with extremely large state spaces, and could, in principle, be integrated in the muti-agent systems development process. A preliminary implementation of the approach in the NuMAS system shows promising results.

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