Implementing and Evaluating a Runtime Conformance Checker for Mobile Agent Systems

by Ahmad Saifan, Juergen Dingel, Jeremy S. Bradbury, Ernesto Posse

Abstract

Mobile Agent Systems (MAS) are a special kind of distributed system in which the agent software has the capability to reconfigure dynamically and move from one physical host to another. Our paper describes and implements a new approach for checking the conformance of a MAS with respect to an executable model. In order to comprehensively check the effectiveness and the efficiency of our conformance check, we have built a mutation-based evaluation framework. In this framework a set of 29 new mutation operators for mobile agent systems have been identified. Each mutation operator was used to automatically generate a number of mutants programs – each program differs from our executable model in some unique way. We then use our conformance checking approach to compare the mutant MAS implementations with the executable model and determine if the nonconformance can be identified. Our experimental results suggest that our approach is very effective and efficient in detecting nonconformance using non-equivalent mutants.

Bibliographic Information [Bibtex format]

@inproceedings{SDBP11,
Title = {Implementing and Evaluating a Runtime Conformance Checker for Mobile Agent Systems},
Author = {Ahmad Saifan and Juergen Dingel and Jeremy S. Bradbury and Ernesto Posse},
Booktitle = {Proc. of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST 2011)},
Month = {Mar.},
Year = {2011},
Pages = {269--278}}

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