Compatibility and future-proof testing for multi-agent systems

Addressing the problem that independently developed autonomous agents (such as autonomous vehicles) must satisfy joint compatibility requirements such as safety and task completion in a shared environment, the researchers propose a two-layer structure in which a regulator publishes seed agents and each developer independently tests that its agent remains compatible with all seed-compatible agents, a property the authors call future-proofness. Under this structure, joint compatibility can be guaranteed without centralized specifications or interaction mechanisms and without developers coordinating with one another. The paper formally defines compatibility for general multi-agent systems, shows that seed compatibility does not trivially imply joint compatibility, characterizes future-proof agents as the closure of the seeds and proves that it is monotone with respect to the seeds, and finally studies a class of executable tests that require interaction only with the seeds, exploring the extent to which they can distinguish future-proof agents.