tailieunhanh - Formal specification of agent behaviour through environment scenarios

Formal specification of agent behaviour through environment scenarios introduces a formal notation for the specification of scenario s in agent based systems. The autonomous and collaborative behavior of an agent can be formally specified by a set of rules describing its activity in various scenarios. The power of the approach is illustrated by the formal specification of maes.   | Formal Specification of Agent Behaviour through Environment Scenarios Hong Zhu School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences Oxford Brookes University Gipsy Lane Headington Oxford OX3 0BP England hzhu@ Tel 44 1865 483670 Fax 483666 Abstract. Scenarios are typical situations that may occur in the operation of a software system. Scenario analysis plays an important role in software requirements analysis and design. This paper introduces a formal notation for the specification of scenarios in agent-based systems. The autonomous and collaborative behavior of an agent can be formally specified by a set of rules describing its activity in various scenarios. The power of the approach is illustrated by the formal specification of Maes personal assistant agent Maxims. The paper also shows that agents social behavior such as speech act can also be formally specified as scenario-reaction rules. 1 Introduction Being autonomous proactive and adaptive an agent-based system may demonstrate emergent behaviours which are neither designed nor expected by the developers or users of the system. Whether or not such emergent behaviours are advantageous methods for the specification of agent behaviours should be developed to enable software engineers to analyse the behaviour of agent-based systems. The past few years have seen a rapid growth in the research on formal models of agent-based systems specified in various formalisms and logics such as temporal logics first order logics and game theories etc. see . 1 2 3 . However there are few researches on the language facilities and features that support the formal specification and verification of agent-based systems although efforts have been made to define new formal specification languages for example LW 4 DESIRE 5 and ETL 6 . This paper reports our research in progress on a formal method for the specification proof and analysis of the behavior of agent-based systems. The basic idea is to specify an agent s behaviour by