JAT4BDI: An Aspect-Based Approach for Testing BDI Agents

Multi-agent systems (MAS) for software construction is an approach that has been applied to different and complex domains that require distributed and intelligent environments. A crucial concern related to MAS is how software agents based on the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model should be tested. An agent is an autonomous and pro-active entity that can exchange information with other agents distributed. Due these characteristics to create unit tests for agents is a big challenge. In the literature there are several approaches that tries to deal with such challenge, however, they do not provide mechanisms to assist developers in identifying errors and in how observe the internal state of agent elements (e.g. beliefs, goals, plans, events, messages) during the development process. Thus, this paper presents a new approach to testing BDI agents based on the aspect technology.