Ulrich Furbach, Jan Murray, Falk Schmidsberger, Frieder Stolzenburg
Programming Multi-Agent Systems 5th International Workshop, ProMAS 2007 Honolulu, HI, USA, May 15, 2007 Revised and Invited Papers
Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4908
Springer
2008
This paper shows how multiagent systems can be modeled by a combination of UML statecharts and hybrid automata. This allows formal system specification on different levels of abstraction on the one hand and expressing real-time system behavior with continuous variables on the other hand. It is shown, how multi-robot systems can be modeled by hybrid and hierarchical state machines and how model checking techniques for hybrid automata can be applied. An enhanced synchronization concept is introduced that allows synchronization taking time and avoids state explosion to a certain extent. This research is supported by the grants Fu 263/8 and Sto 421/2 from the German research foundation DFG within the special priority program 1125 on Cooperating Teams of Mobile Robots in Dynamic Environments.
