Abstract Autonomous multi-agent systems use different modes of communication to support their autonomy and ease of interaction. In order to enable modelling and reasoning about such systems, we need frameworks that combine many forms of communication. R-CHECK is a modelling, simulation, and verification environment supporting the development of multi-agent systems, providing attributed channelled broadcast and multicast communication. Another common communication mode is point-to-point, wherein agents communicate with each other directly. Capturing point-to-point through R-CHECK ’s multicast and broadcast is possible, but cumbersome and prone to interference. Here, we extend R-CHECK (and its underlying formal calculus ReCiPe ) with bidirectional attributed point-to-point communication, which can be established based on identity or properties of participants. Moreover, we provide a compositional semantics that clearly describes how different modes of interaction co-exist without interference. We also support model-checking of point-to-point interactions by extending linear temporal logic with observation descriptors related to the participants in this communication mode. We argue that these extensions simplify the design, and demonstrate their benefits by means of an illustrative case study.

Abstract Reconfigurable interacting systems consist of a set of autonomous agents, with integrated interaction capabilities that feature opportunistic interaction. Agents seemingly reconfigure their interaction interfaces by forming collectives and interact based on mutual interests. Finding ways to design and analyse the behaviour of these systems is a vigorously pursued research goal. In this article, we provide a modelling and analysis environment for the design of such system. Our tool offers simulation and verification to facilitate native reasoning about the domain concepts of such systems. We present our tool named R-CHECK (please find the associated toolkit repository here: https://github.com/dsynma/recipe ). R-CHECK supports a high-level input language with matching enumerative and symbolic semantics and provides modelling convenience for features such as reconfiguration, coalition formation, and self-organisation. For analysis, users can simulate the designed system and explore arising traces. Our included model checker permits reasoning about interaction protocols and joint missions.

We propose a formalism to model and reason about reconfigurable multi-agent systems. In our formalism, agents interact and communicate in different modes so that they can pursue joint tasks; agents may dynamically synchronize, exchange data, adapt their behaviour, and reconfigure their communication interfaces. Inspired by existing multi-robot systems, we represent a system as a set of agents (each with local state), executing independently and only influence each other by means of message exchange. Agents are able to sense their local states and partially their surroundings. We extend ltl to be able to reason explicitly about the intentions of agents in the interaction and their communication protocols. We also study the complexity of satisfiability and model-checking of this extension.

Collective adaptive systems are new emerging computational systems consisting of a large number of interacting components and featuring complex behaviour. These systems are usually distributed, heterogeneous, decentralised and interdependent, and are operating in dynamic and possibly unpredictable environments. Finding ways to understand and design these systems and, most of all, to model the interactions of their components, is a difficult but important endeavour. In this article we propose a language-based approach for programming the interactions of collective-adaptive systems by relying on attribute-based communication; a paradigm that permits a group of partners to communicate by considering their run-time properties and capabilities. We introduce AbC, a foundational calculus for attribute-based communication and show how its linguistic primitives can be used to program a sophisticated variant of the well-known problem of Stable Allocation in Content Delivery Networks. In our variant, content providers are assigned to clients based on collaboration and by taking into account the preferences of both parties in a fully anonymous and distributed settings. We also illustrate the expressive power of attribute-based communication by showing the natural encoding of group-based, publish/subscribe-based and channel-based communication paradigms into AbC.

Abstract Collective adaptive systems exhibit a particular notion of interaction where environmental conditions largely influence interactions. Previously, we proposed a calculus, namedAbC, to model and reason about CAS. The calculus proved to be effective by naturally modelling essential CAS features. However, the question on the tradeoff between its expressiveness and its efficiency, when implemented to program CAS applications, is to be answered. In this article, we propose an efficient and distributed coordination infrastructure forAbC. We prove its correctness, and we evaluate its performance. The main novelty of our approach is thatAbCcomponents are infrastructure agnostic. Thus the code of a component does not specify how messages are routed in the infrastructure but rather what properties a target component must satisfy. We also developed a Go API, named $$\mathcal {G}{} \textit{o}\mathcal {A}{} \textit{t}$$ GoAt , and an Eclipse plugin to program in a high-level syntax which can be automatically used to generate matching Go code. We showcase our development through a non-trivial case study.