Automatic generation of self-monitoring MASs from multiparty global session types in Jason

Abstract

Global session types are behavioral types designed for specifying in a compact way multiparty interactions between distributed components, and verifying their correctness. We take advantage of the fact that global session types can be naturally represented as cyclic Prolog terms - which are directly supported by the Jason implementation of AgentSpeak - to allow simple automatic generation of self-monitoring MASs: given a global session type specifying an interaction protocol, and the implementation of a MAS where agents are expected to be compliant with it, we define a procedure for automatically deriving a selfmonitoring MAS. Such a generated MAS ensures that agents conform to the protocol at run-time, by adding a monitor agent that checks that the ongoing conversation is correct w.r.t. the global session type. The feasibility of the approach has been experimented in Jason for a non-trivial example involving recursive global session types with alternative choice and fork type constructors. Although the main aim of this work is the development of a unit testing framework for MASs, the proposed approach can be also extended to implement a framework supporting self-recovering MASs. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.