On the testability of BDI agents
Cite this item:
Winikoff, M., & Cranefield, S. (2010). On the testability of BDI agents. Presented at the 8th European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems.
Permanent link to OUR Archive version:
http://hdl.handle.net/10523/700
Abstract:
Before deploying a software system we need to assure ourselves that the system will behave correctly. This assurance is usually done by testing the system. However, it is intuitively obvious that adaptive systems, including agent-based systems, can exhibit complex behaviour, and are thus harder to test. In this paper we examine this intuition in the case of Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents. We analyse the size of the behaviour space of BDI agents and show that although the intuition is correct, we found that the introduction of failure handling had a much larger effect on the size of the behaviour space than we expected. We also discuss the implications of these findings on the testability of BDI agents.
Date:
2010-12-16
Conference:
8th European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems
Research Type:
Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Notes:
This is the final version of a paper that was peer reviewed and accepted for presentation at the 8th European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems, 2010 (which has no formal proceedings). It is a shorter version of the paper at http://hdl.handle.net/10523/1462.