Implementing and Evaluating a Runtime Conformance Checker for Mobile Agent Systems

A Mobile Agent System (MAS) is a special kind of distributed system in which the agent software can move from one physical host to another. This paper describes a new approach, together with its implementation and evaluation, for checking the conformance of a MAS with respect to an executable model. In order to check the effectiveness of our conformance check, we have built a mutation-based evaluation framework. Part of the framework is a set of 29 new mutation operators for mobile agent systems. Our conformance checking approach is used to compare the mutated agents with the executable model and determine nonconformance. Our experimental results suggest that our approach holds promise for the generation and detection of non-equivalent mutants.