Specification and testing of autonomous agents in e-commerce systems<FNR></FNR><FN>Parts of this paper appeared in ‘Specification of autonomous agents in e-commerce systems’ by Ismael Rodríguez, Manuel Núñez and Fernando Rubio and in ‘Testing of autonomous agents described as utility state machines’ by Manuel Núñez, Ismael Rodríguez and Fernando Rubio, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 3236 (pp. 30–43 and 322–336, respectively) © 2004 Springer-Verlag. This revised and expanded version appears with the permission of Springer-Verlag </FN>

This paper presents a generic formal framework to specify and test autonomous e-commerce agents. First, the formalism to represent the behaviour of agents is introduced. The corresponding machinery to define how implementations can be tested follows. Two testing approaches are considered. The first of them, which can be called active, is based on stimulating the implementation under test (IUT) with a test. The peculiarity is that tests will be defined as a special case of autonomous e-commerce agent. The second approach, which can be called passive, consists of observing the behaviour of the tested agent in an environment containing other agents. As a case study the framework is applied to the e-commerce system Kasbah. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]