An Approach to Verification of a Family of Multiagent Systems for Conflict Resolution

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a verification method for families of distributed systems generated by a context-sensitive network grammar of a special kind. The grammar includes special non-terminal symbols, so-called quasi-terminals, which uniquely correspond to grammar terminals. These quasi-terminals specify processes that are mergings of basic system processes; in contrast, simple nonterminals specify networks of parallel compositions of these processes. The verification method is based on the model-checking technique and abstraction. An abstract representative model for a family of systems depends on their specification grammar and the system properties to be verified. This model simulates the behavior of the systems in such a way that the properties holding for the representative model are satisfied for all these systems. The properties of the representative model can be verified by the model-checking method. The properties of the system generated are specified using the universal branching time logic ∀CTL with finite deterministic automata as atomic formulas. We demonstrate the application of the proposed method to verification of some properties of a multiagent system for conflict resolution, particularly for context-dependent disambiguation in ontology population. We also suggest that this approach should be used for verification of computations on subgrids that are subgraphs of computation grids. In particular, it can be used to compute the parity of the number of active processes in a subgrid.