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Formal Verification of Opinion Formation in Swarms

Published: 09 May 2016 Publication History

Abstract

We investigate the formal verification of consensus protocols in swarm systems composed of arbitrary many agents. We use templates to define the behaviour of the agents in an opinion dynamics setting and formulate their verification in terms of the associated parameterised model checking problem. We define a finite abstract model that we show to simulate swarms of any size, thereby precisely encoding any concrete instantiation of the swarm. We give an automatic procedure for verifying temporal-epistemic properties of consensus protocols by model checking the associated finite abstract model. We present a toolkit that can be used to generate the abstract model automatically and verify a given protocol by symbolic model checking. We use the toolkit to verify the correctness of majority rule protocols in arbitrary large swarms.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Towards formal verification of neuro-symbolic multi-agent systemsProceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence10.24963/ijcai.2023/800(7014-7019)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2023
  • (2019)A Counter Abstraction Technique for the Verification of Probabilistic Swarm SystemsProceedings of the 18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems10.5555/3306127.3331689(161-169)Online publication date: 8-May-2019
  • (2017)Verifying fault-tolerance in parameterised multi-agent systemsProceedings of the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence10.5555/3171642.3171684(288-294)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2017
  • Show More Cited By

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Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
AAMAS '16: Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems
May 2016
1580 pages
ISBN:9781450342391

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  • IFAAMAS

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Publisher

International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

Richland, SC

Publication History

Published: 09 May 2016

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Author Tags

  1. consensus
  2. epistemic logic
  3. parameterised model checking
  4. swarm robotics

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  • Research-article

Funding Sources

  • EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship
  • EPSRC Research Project Trusted Autonomous Systems (grant No. EP/I00520X/1)

Conference

AAMAS '16
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AAMAS '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 137 of 550 submissions, 25%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,155 of 5,036 submissions, 23%

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View all
  • (2023)Towards formal verification of neuro-symbolic multi-agent systemsProceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence10.24963/ijcai.2023/800(7014-7019)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2023
  • (2019)A Counter Abstraction Technique for the Verification of Probabilistic Swarm SystemsProceedings of the 18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems10.5555/3306127.3331689(161-169)Online publication date: 8-May-2019
  • (2017)Verifying fault-tolerance in parameterised multi-agent systemsProceedings of the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence10.5555/3171642.3171684(288-294)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2017
  • (2016)Parameterised model checking for alternating-time temporal logicProceedings of the Twenty-second European Conference on Artificial Intelligence10.3233/978-1-61499-672-9-1230(1230-1238)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2016

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