---
title: "Spectrum-Based Fault Localisation for Multi-Agent Systems"
authors:
  - "Lúcio S. Passos"
  - "Rui Abreu"
  - "Rosaldo J. F. Rossetti"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/164"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/0164.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2015
pages: "1134-1139"
track: "Main Track"
keywords:
---

# Spectrum-Based Fault Localisation for Multi-Agent Systems

Lúcio S. Passos, Rui Abreu, Rosaldo J. F. Rossetti

*Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1134-1139.

## Abstract

Diagnosing unwanted behaviour in Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) is crucial to ascertain agents' correct operation. However, generation of MAS models is both error-prone and time intense, as it exponentially increases with the number of agents and their interactions. In this paper, we propose a light-weight, automatic debugging-based technique, coined ESFL-MAS, which shortens the diagnostic process, while only relying on minimal information about the system. ESFL-MAS uses a heuristic that quantifies the suspiciousness of an agent to be faulty; therefore, different heuristics may have different impact on the diagnostic quality. Our experimental evaluation shows that 10 out of 42 heuristics yield the best diagnostic accuracy (96.26% on average).