Detection and verification of a new type of emergent behavior in multiagent systems

The verification of Distributed Software Systems (DSS) and Multi agent systems (MAS) has taken a special attention due to the growing demand of having DSS in this decade. MAS and DSS are a class of software in which functionality or control is distributed. This may cause components (agents) to emerge an unexpected behavior in their runtime, which was not seen in the requirement and design. This is known as emergent behavior of components. The cost of detecting and fixing of such problem is much more valuable compared to fix them after deployment. Therefore, in this paper a new type of emergent behavior that can happen in MAS is investigated. A method for verification of this type of emergent behavior is proposed followed by an algorithm. This type of emergent behavior can not be detected with the existing methods of emergent behavior detection. This type of emergent behavior focuses on one component when it misses the information about the senders of the same message from different components. The contribution of this work rather than investigating this type of emergent behaviors is on its verification method and also proposing a solution to fix it. The details are shown through a case study on MaSE artifacts which is an Agent Oriented Software Engineering methodology.