Analysis of Dynamic Properties of Agent Systems: Co-operating Information Agents

In this chapter a compositional analysis method for agent systems is introduced and illustrated for an example agent system for co-operative information gathering. For this example agent system as a whole, a successfulness property is formulated. It is shown how this property can be logically related to properties of agents (in particular, pro-activeness and reactiveness properties), and how these agent properties in turn can be related to properties of the agent components. A component-based system specification is introduced in Section 4. The system specification defines how the system is composed of the agents and the environment component (external world), and how each agent is composed of four agent components: for own process control, world interaction management, agent interaction management, and an agent specific task. The component-based design itself is expressed in the modelling framework of DESIRE, shortly introduced in Section 2. The compositional analysis method is briefly described in Section 3. In Section 4 the example system is introduced. The application of the compositional analysis method to the example agent system is presented in Section 5 for the top level of the composition. More details on the lower levels (within the agents) can be found in Sections 6 and 7. Section 8 concludes the chapter.