Rational Agents for the Test of Rational Agents

Intelligent agents are seen as a promising technology to deal with the development of complex systems. Aiming at improving the agent performance, the utility function is responsible for mapping a possible state ,or set of state, with a utility degree associated. Although there are some efforts to facilitate the development of agent based systems, little has been done to propose methods and techniques to test these systems. In this work, we propose the conception of an approach that uses rational agents who are able to test others rational agents. More specifically, in addition to the designer of the agent, the approach involves a tester agent, a monitoring agent and one or more agents for representing the task environment of the tested agent. The test result must indicate the performance of the agent and, especially, the goals that are not being met.