A test agent for testing agents and their communities

Current research and development of agent-based systems has focused primarily on architectures, protocols, frameworks, messaging infrastructure and community interactions. As intelligent agent-based systems take over operations in the financial community, transportation, manufacturing, utilities, aerospace, and the military, assurances will need to be given to the owners and operators of these systems that these non-deterministic, learning systems operate correctly. In many of these environments errors in software can result in large financial losses or bodily harm. To build confidence in the owners and users of agent-based systems, testing and monitoring will need to be done that will instill confidence that these systems work correctly and that errors can be quickly found.