Formal Specification and Verification of Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-agent systems are increasingly complex, and the problem of their verification and validation is acquiring increasing importance. In this paper we show how a well known and effective verification technique, model checking, can be generalized to deal with multi-agent systems. This paper explores a particular type of multi-agent system, in which each agent is viewed as having the three mental attitudes of belief (B), desire (D), and intention (I). We use a multi-modal branching-time logic BDICTL, with a semantics that is grounded in traditional decision theory and a possible-worlds framework. A preliminary implementation of the approach shows promising results.