Developing Formal Specifications of Multi-Agent Systems in SLABS -- A Case Study of Evolutionary Multi-Agent Ecosystem

The recent years has seen a rapid growth of research interests in agent-oriented software development methodology. A great amount of work has been reported in the literature on formal models and logics of software agents. However, how to use such formalisms in the analysis and specification of agent-based systems remains as an open problem. Alternative approaches using semi-formal diagrammatic notations for the analysis and specification of agentbased software systems have emerged recently. Unfortunately, there is a big gap between the formal and informal approaches. This paper investigates a process and method of agent-oriented software analysis and specification that use a simple diagrammatic notation for the development of agent models and derive a formal specification of multi-agent systems with the help of such diagrammatic notations. The method is illustrated by an example of the evolutionary multiagent ecosystem Amalthaea developed at MIT Media Lab.