From Formal Specification to Model Checking of MAS Using CSP-Z and SPIN

As a result of the increasingly predominance of agent technology, there has been a lot of interest in developing agent-based methodologies. In particular, formal methodologies have recently received the attention of the agent community. One of the key features of these methodologies is their emphasis on the use of formal methods as a means to trust multiagent systems (MAS) to behave as expected. The main purpose of this paper is to extend the development process of a formal approach for designing agent-based applications, called ForMAAD. The effort expended in the added phase is concentrated on two tasks: formally specify MAS to provide a more concrete specification, and verify that the specified system fulfils correctness properties. The adoption of formal techniques from the concurrency theory is founded on the view of MAS as a computational organization of concurrent problem-solving entities.