Ensuring Agent Properties under Arbitrary Sequences of Incoming Events

This paper deals with run-time detection and possible correction of erroneous and/or anomalous behavior in agents. Agent behavior is affected by its interaction with the external world, i.e., by events perceived by the agent and in which order. Nevertheless, in most practical cases, the actual arrival order of events is unforeseeable, and the set of possible events is so large that computing all combinations would result in a combinatorial explosion, resorting to “priori” verification techniques is actually unpractical. However, properties that one wants to verify often depend upon which events have been observed by an agent up to a certain point, and which other ones are supposed to occur later. Therefore, we augment our previous approaches by allowing an agent to explicitly observe and record its past behavior so as to be able to decide its best actions, and avoid errors performed in previous similar situations.