Testing Agentic Service Systems: An Agentic Living Lab Methodology Across the Physical-Digital Continuum

Zhongjie Wang, Xiang He, Xiao Wang, Mingyi Liu, Shuang Yu +1

Task success is insufficient for testing agents that act for principals, change persistent business state, and affect physical processes: a useful result may be unauthorized, leave obligations unresolved, or depend on the execution substrate. We propose an Agentic Living Lab methodology organized around three questions: what is the test unit, who and what participate, and under what reality is the test executed? The unit is a service episode containing delegated roles, obligations, world state, and evidence. The method separates agents under test from environment actors and distinguishes real humans, human traces, rule surrogates, and agent-based proxies. Realization Profiles, capability-declared Reality Substrate bindings, Grounding Profiles, and Semantic Delta disclosures make changes across software, enterprise systems, simulation, and physical settings explicit. A four-plane reference architecture separates experiment control, participants, world realization, and evidence evaluation, with cross-cutting authority and governance controls. Runtime semantics distinguish intent, normative admission, and factual reconciliation. Real stakeholder grounding, participant calibration or…