Distributed Runtime Verification of JADE and Jason Multiagent Systems with Prolog

Verifying properties of interactions taking place inside open, complex, distributed, dynamic systems is of paramount importance for most applications and is mandatory for safety-critical ones. Verification can take place at design time (o✏ine or static verification) or at runtime (online or dynamic). For runtime verification some layer between the monitor executing the verification engine and the system under monitoring must exist, so that actual interactions can be intercepted and the compliance of each one against the protocol can be checked. A common way to improve e ciency and fault tolerance of the runtime verification is to distribute it among many monitors. This requires that the protocol is projected onto subsets of participants. If the system has been engineered as a multiagent system (MAS), which is a good option when openness, complexity, distribution, dynamics are characterizing features, then the choice of either JADE, http://jade.tilab.com/, or Jason http://jason.sourceforge.net/, as the platform for implementing it may be a very natural one. JADE, implemented in Java, is the state-of-the-art tool for MAS development and has been used for many real industrial applications. Jason, implemented in Java as well and based on a Prolog engine built from scratch by its developers, is one of the most widely used frameworks when the agents under development are designed according to the Belief, Desire, Intentions (BDI) architecture. Due to the wide range of possible application fields of Jason and to the large amount of real use cases of JADE, being able to verify interactions taking place in MASs implemented in one of these two frameworks is a concrete step towards making MASs more reliable and enhancing their industrial and commercial usability. In this demo we show our contribution for the achievement of this goal. We have in fact designed and implemented a framework for distributed runtime verification of MASs and ad hoc interfaces for monitoring JADE and Jason interactions. The framework consists of four layers: (1) a formalism for describing agent interaction protocols (AIPs) based on constrained global types [1] and their extension with attributes [7]; (2) a mechanism for projecting AIPs onto subsets of agents, obtaining a new protocol in the same formalism of constrained global types [2]; (3) a mechanism for verifying that interactions are compliant