SLABS: A formal specification language for agent-based systems

Being autonomous, proactive and adaptive, an agent-based system may demonstrate emergent behaviours, which are neither designed by the developers nor expected by the users of the system. Whether or not such emergent behaviours are advantageous, methods for the specification of agent behaviours must be developed to enable software engineers to analyse agent-based systems before they are implemented. This paper presents a formal specification language SLABS for agent-based systems. It is a model-based specification language defined based on the notion of agents as encapsulations of data, operations and behaviours. The behaviour of an agent is defined by a set of rules that describe the action/reaction of the agent in certain environment scenarios. The style and expressiveness of the language is demonstrated by examples like ants, personal assistants and speech-act style of agent communications.