Search-based testing of multi-agent manufacturing systems for deadlocks based on models

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have been extensively used in the automation of manufacturing systems. However, similar to other distributed systems, autonomous agents' interaction in the Automated Manufacturing Systems (AMS) can potentially lead to runtime behavioral failures including deadlocks. Deadlocks can cause major financial consequences by negatively affecting the production cost and time. Although the deadlock monitoring techniques can prevent the harmful effects of deadlocks at runtime, but the testing techniques are able to detect design faults during the system design and development stages that can potentially lead to deadlock at runtime. In this paper, we propose a search based testing technique for deadlock detection in multi-agent manufacturing system based on the MAS design models. MAS design artifacts, constructed using Multi-agent Software Engineering (MaSE) methodology, are used for extracting test requirements for deadlock detection. As the case study, the proposed technique is applied to a multi-agent manufacturing system for verifying its effectiveness. A MAS simulator has been developed to simulate multi-agent manufacturing system behavior under test and the proposed testing technique has been implemented in a test requirement generator tool which creates test requirements based on the given design models.