A Formal Approach for Modeling and Testing Agent Interactions Using Recursive Colored Petri Nets

Among all the proposed techniques for software testing, the model-based testing technique has gained attention with the popularization of models in software design and development. Of particular importance are formal models with precise semantics. However, the most researches argue that building an abstract formal model for the system under test requires excessive amount of skills from the tester and a large effort in terms of man-hours needed. To cope with such drawbacks, the testing approach of agent interaction protocol, proposed so far, translates automatically a semi-formal specification described by means of AUML sequence diagram into a Recursive Colored Petri Net (RCPN) model. The obtained RCPN is then animated in order to obtain its corresponding reachability graph. Every sequence path of this reachability graph is considered as an abstract test case. Those ones are then concretized and addressed to the system under test. The responses of the system are, finally, compared to the expected results derived from the abstract test model. As a case study, we selected the FIPA Brokering Interaction Protocol. Here, some patent literature has also been discussed.