On the Validation of Belief–Desire–Intention Agents

Testing and Debugging multi-agent systems (MAS) which are inherently concurrent and distributed – is a challenging task. While complex application scenarios demand intelligent entities with autonomous reasoning capabilities, the applied reasoning mechanisms impair current approaches to validate MAS implementations. Reactive planning systems, namely the well-known Belief Desire Intention (BDI) architecture, have been successfully applied to implement these intelligent entities by means of goal directed agents. Despite testing and debugging, used to validate whether implementations behave as intended, are crucial to serious development efforts, only minor attention has been payed to corresponding tool support and testing procedures for BDI–based MAS. In this paper we describe and categorize common bugs in BDI–based MAS implementations and discuss similarities and differences to general software testing procedures. We particularly examine how the reasoning mechanism inside agent implementations can be checked and how static analysis of agent declarations can be used to visualize and check the overall communication structure in closed MAS. We present corresponding tool support, which relies on the definition of crosscutting concerns in BDI agents and enables both approaches to the Jadex Agent Platform.