A publish-subscribe based architecture for testing multiagent systems

Abstract

Multiagent systems (MASs) have been applied to several application domains, such as e-commerce, unmanned vehicles, and many others. In addition, a set of different techniques has been integrated into multiagent applications. However, few of these applications have been commercially deployed and few of these techniques have been fully exploited by industrial applications. One reason is the lack of procedures guaranteeing that multiagent systems would behave as desired. Most of the existing test approaches only test agents as single individuals and do not provide ways of inspecting the behavior of an agent as part of a group, and the behavior of the whole group of agents. Accordingly, we modeled and developed a publishsubscribe- based architecture to facilitate the implementation of systems to test MASs at the agent and group levels. To illustrate and evaluate the use of the proposed architecture, we developed an MAS-based application and performed functional and performance ad-hoc tests.