Timothy H. Lacey
Description
This is a AIR FORCE INST OF TECH WRIGHT-PATTERSONAFB OH SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING report procured by the Pentagon and made available for public release. I
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t has been reproduced in the best form available to the Pentagon. It is not spiral-bound, but rather assembled with Velobinding in a soft, white linen cover. The Storming Media report number is A627083. The abstract provided by the Pentagon follows: As network bandwidth increases, distributed applications are becoming increasingly prevalent. Systems using these applications are very complicated to build and must be dependable. Software agents are ideal for breaking complicated problems into manageable subtasks. Agent conversations, a series of messages passed between agents, are the cornerstone of multi-agent systems and must be deemed correct before being placed into service. The purpose of this research was to develop a formal methodology and technique to verify that the communication protocols defined in a multi-agent environment were valid. This was accomplished by examining agent conversations before deploying the system. An additional goal of this research was to develop a proof-of-concept module for agentTool that automatically verified some of the important properties identified in this methodology.
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