Agent systems verification : systematic literature review and mapping

Abstract

Agent systems are distributed systems consist of agents that autonomously interact to each other in an environment to perform tasks and achieve goals. Performing verification is important to ensure correctness of agent properties and to detect faults. The objective of this review is to identify research gap and future research direction of agent systems verification. In this study, the surveys of existing techniques for checking agent properties and detecting faults during design, development and runtime phases of agent system life-cycle are presented. Search terms with relevant keywords were used to identify primary studies that relate to the topic of discussion. Next, the studies were classified based on the used techniques and the addressed properties. 231 primary studies were identified during the search process. From these studies, 49% were implemented for verification of agent systems during design, 27% during development and 25% during runtime. Model checking or model-based verification techniques are the highest proposed techniques (44%) followed by the testing and debugging during development (17%). The properties that are largely addressed by the selected studies are temporal properties (19%) and epistemic properties (9%). At the end of the review, the research gap and the future research direction are presented.