Verifying Interlevel Relations within Multi-Agent Systems: formal theoretical basis

In the general case, at any aggregation level a behavioral specification for a multi-agent system component consists of dynamic properties expressed by complex temporal relations in TTL, which therefore does not allow direct application of automatic verification procedures, more specifically, model checking techniques, used in this paper. In order to apply model checking techniques it is needed to transform an original behavioral specification of a certain aggregation level into a model based on a finite state transition system. In order to obtain this, as a first step a behavioral description for the lower aggregation level is replaced by one in executable (temporal) format. As a solution, an automated substitution of the behavioral specification for the component by an executable specification (expressed in an executable temporal language) is put forward. The justification is based on the theorem that a behavioral specification entails a certain dynamic property if and only if the generated executable specification entails the same property. The proof for this theorem and other formal theoretical results are given in Section 2.