Verification of communication protocols in a multi-agent system

This paper provides a framework for specification and verification of intelligent agent-based systems, with the emphasis on their cognitive and reactive features. We use an epistemic transition system to specify the agents and an epistemic synchronous product to specify the multi-agent system. We verify the system by means of a special action-based logic - ACTLW for Epistemic Reasoning (ACTLW stands for Action Computation Tree Logic with Unless Operator). Using temporal and epistemic operators we create the appropriate formulae to check whether the relevant property holds, or the protocol works within the given conditions. We test our method by the example of security communication protocol called Dining Cryptographers.