Our paper “A Compositional Semantics for Reconfigurable Multi-Mode Interaction in R-CHECK” has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT).

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.

A preprint is available here.

Many thanks to my coauthors Yehia Abd Alhraman, Nir Piterman, and Shaun Azzopardi. Also, thanks to my BSc thesis student Benjamin Stolz for implementing the type checker that constitutes one of the new features of our R-CHECK plugin for VSCode.