GENETIC ALGORITHM BASED APPROACH TO TEST THE PROACTIVITY OF SOFTWARE AGENTS

A ZEROTH REVIEW REPORT

Submitted by

P.DHANAVANTHINI

in partial fulfillment for the award of the degree of

MASTER OF TECHNOLOGY
in

COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING SYTEMS

PONDICHERRY ENGINEERING COLLEGE, PILLAICHAVADI

INDIA::PUDUCHERRY 605 014

JULY 2011

PONDICHEERY ENGINEERING COLLEGE PUDUCHERRY 600 014

BONAFIDE CERTIFICATE

Certified that this zeroth review report GENETIC ALGORITHM

BASED APPROACH TO TEST THE PROACTIVITY OF SOFTWARE AGENTS

is the bonafide work of P.DHANAVANTHINI who carried out the work under my supervision.

GUIDES SIGNATURE Mr. N.SIVAKUMAR, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Pondicherry Engineering College, Pillaichavadi ,Puducherry 605014.

INTRODUCTION
Software is composed of programs, data, and documents. Each of these items comprises a configuration that is created as part of the software engineering process. A software development methodology refers to the framework that is used to structure, plan, and control the process of developing a software system. A wide variety of such frameworks have evolved over the years, each with its own recognized strengths and weaknesses. One system development methodology is not necessarily suitable for use by all projects A programming paradigm is a fundamental style of computer programming. That may differ in the concepts and elements which we use in the program. Agent-oriented techniques represent an exciting new means of analyzing, designing and building complex software systems. They have the potential to significantly improve current practice in software engineering and to extend the range of applications that can feasibly be tackled. Agent-oriented programming is a programming paradigm introduced by yoav Shoham in 1990.Agent Oriented Programming (AOP) is most often motivated by the need for open architectures that continuously change and evolve to accommodate new components and meet new requirements. These systems often involve variety of users and heterogeneous platforms. They need to be evolved continuously in order to meet the changes of business and technology. In some circumstances, they need to be autonomous and adaptive for dealing with different preferences and pervasive amount of information. As these systems are increasingly taking over operations in enterprise management and financing, assurances need to be given to their owners and their users that these complex systems operate properly. The agent-oriented paradigm can be considered a natural extension to the object-oriented (OO) paradigm. Agents differ from objects in many issues which require special modeling elements but have some similarities. Agents autonomously work in dynamic and uncertain environments. Each agent senses the environment and acts accordingly. Since the environment in which the agent reside change dynamically, the construction of the agents should be such that it is able to accomplish the desired tasks by collaborating with other agents.

The characteristics of agents are as follows: The parameters defining the agents are Beliefs, commitments, capabilities and choices. The process of computing or the mode of communication in agent oriented programming is message passing and response methods. Message types in agent oriented programming includes Inform, request, offer, promise, decline. In agent oriented programming we have constraints on methods such as honesty, consistency etc. The characteristics of objects are as follows: There are no constraints on defining the parameters. The process of computing or the mode of communication in agent oriented programming is message passing and response methods. There are no constraints on defining the message types. There are no constraints on methods too.

RELATED WORKS
The properties and models of software agents by Prof Dr.Erika Horn,Mraio Kupries. In this paper the components of an agent system is mapped to object-oriented model types. This paper describes the software architecture and properties of software agents. K.F. Man, K.S.Tang and S. Kwong has explained Genetic algorithm, concepts and its application in a detailed manner, which includes concepts such as mutation, cross over and etc.,. Roy P. Pragas and few others has explained Automatic test data generation using Genetic algorithms using control dependency graph employing T-Gen tool for test case generation. Chia-En Lin, Krishna has discussed various methodologies to evaluate agent oriented software techniques and the properties that are necessary to form an Agent society with the purpose of achieving system-wide goals in MAS. Praveen Ranjan Srivastava and Karthik Anand V have explained regression procedure using message flow graph (MFG) for agent oriented software .

PROBLEM FORMULATION
Agent-based computing aims to provide a means of conceptualising, designing, and realising software systems that exhibit these desired characteristics.Thus, there are compelling reasons to use this technology because of the modest plan and goal structure provides well over a million ways to achieve a given goal, providing enormous flexibility in a modular manner. However the complexity of the systems that can be built using this technology does create concerns about how to validate their correctness. A system built in terms of autonomous agents may require even greater correctness assurance than one which is merely reacting to the immediate control of its users. Agents make substantial decisions for themselves, so thorough testing is an important consideration. However, proactive nature of the agents also makes testing harder; by their nature, autonomous agents may react in different ways to the same inputs over time, because, for instance they have changeable goals and knowledge. Agents differ from objects in many issues which require special modeling elements but have some similarities. Although there is a well-defined OO testing technique, agentoriented development has neither a standard development process nor a standard testing technique. However, many methodologies like MASE, Prometheus, Tropos do exist for the agent oriented framework but on contrary to it the testing techniques for the methodologies are very few and they do not outline a perfect testing procedure that caters a wide range of test case context in agent oriented framework. Thus in this research I test the proactive nature of an agent oriented software using various parameters. Proactive property is the major concern of my research because there are no research works to measure the proactivity of the software agents. Unless we test, we cannot measure the proactivity of the software agents. There are a number of techniques for generating automatic test cases. For generating test cases in my research I use genetic algorithm. Genetic algorithm is a promising technique for generating test cases and it is based on the Darwins principle of survival of the fittest. Hence we use genetic algorithm to test and measure the proactive property of an agent oriented software system.

HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARES EMPLOYED

2.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor with 3MB shared L3 cache. 4GB of 1333MHz DDR3 memory..

SOFTWARES EMPLOYED
Operating System: Windows XP SP3 or Windows7. JADE (Java Agent Development Environment). Automatic test case generation tool (eCAT). JAVA eclipse.

REFERENCES
[1] Duy Cu Nguyen, Anna Perini, and Paolo Tonella, "A Goal-Oriented Software Testing Methodology", AOSE 2007, LNCS 4951, pp. 5872, 2008 [2] Praveen Ranjan Srivastava, Karthik Anand V, Subba Reddy V, Raghurama G, "Regression Testing Techniques for Agent Oriented Software", International Conference on Information Technology, pp. 221-225, 2008 [3] D. Berndt, J. Fisher, L. Johnson, J. Pinglikar, and A. Watkins, "Breeding Software Test Cases with Genetic Algorithms", Proceedings of the 36th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences., 2002 [4] Nirmal Kumar Gupta, Mukesh Kumar Rohil, "Using Genetic Algorithm for Unit Testing of Object Oriented Software", 2008. [5] Zhiyong Zhang, John Thangarajah, Lin Padgham, Automated Unit Testing for Agent Systems, 2007 [6] Ms. T.M.S.Ummu Salima, Ms. A.Askarunisha and Dr. N.Ramaraj, Enhancing The Efficiency Of Regression TestingThrough Intelligent Agents, International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Multimedia Applications, 2007