BDI agent testability revisited

Abstract Agent-based systems are deployed to solve a wide range of problems in a wide range of domains. Before software is deployed, it is important to obtain assurance that it will function correctly. Traditionally, this assurance is obtained by testing. However, there is an intuition that agents exhibit more complex behaviour than traditional software, which raises the question: how testable are agent systems? We focus on BDI agent programs, and analyse their testability with respect to the all edges test adequacy criterion (also known as “branch coverage”). Our results augment earlier results that considered the all paths criterion to provide a richer and more nuanced understanding of the testability of BDI agents. We show that the number of tests required with respect to the all edges criterion is much lower than that required with respect to the all paths criterion. We also show that, as for the previous analysis, BDI programs are harder to test than equivalently-sized procedural programs, even if exception handling is introduced. Overall, our conclusions lend strength to the earlier work, and motivate the need for work on formal methods for agent systems.

Authors

• Michael Winikoff

Keywords

• Verification and validation of agent-based systems
• Belief–desire-intention (BDI)
• Testability