Symbolic model checking for multi-agent systems

Multi-Agent Systems are increasingly complex, and the problem of their verification and validation is acquiring increasing importance. In this paper we show how a well known and effective verification technique, symbolic model checking, can be generalized to deal with Multi-Agent Systems. Our approach is fully amenable to the reuse of data structures used in symbolic model checking, Binary Decision Diagrams in particular, to deal with extremely large state spaces. A preliminary implementation of the approach in the NuMAS system shows promising results