Specification-centric multi-agent systems

Various industrial and research projects are underway, developing organisations, infrastructure, and software to support the safe sharing and processing of data across organisational boundaries. For example, universities pool medical data on rare diseases, and airline companies trade aircraft sensor data to optimise aircraft maintenance. The AMdEX project develops case-generic data exchange tools for controlling and guiding system behaviour, preserving the accountability of the data consumers to their actions, and enabling the enforcement of user, organisational, legal policies, such as European data protection regulations. The challenge is that the systems must also remain flexible to change, so that systems stay well-behaved as laws are amended, and as the users and their requirements change over time.
This thesis contributes to AMdEX by developing various theoretical and software tools for representing, specifying, and reasoning about multi-agent systems. Reflecting the application to data exchange, these developments emphasise agents' freedom to act independently and change their specifications, while preserving their accountability. The approach is "specification-centric": various activities are unified in acting on shared specifications of behaviour. The early chapters develop new and existing specification languages for use in this multi-agent context: existing specifications are formalised more thoroughly, added language features control how specifications are changed, and new tools are developed to reason about how specifications and scenarios may unfold over time. The later chapters co-design these specification languages with software frameworks and implementations, extending the prior developments to the context where agents and their policy information are distributed over physical networks.