Towards a fault-tolerant multi-agent system architecture

Multi-agent systems are prone to failures typical of any distributed system. Agents and resources may become unavailable due to machine crashes, communication breakdowns, process failures, and numerous other hardware and software failures. Most of the work done in fault handling in multi-agent systems deals with detection and recovery from faults such as state-inconsistencies, relying on the traditional techniques for recovering from other distributed systems failure. However, the traditional faulttolerance techniques are designed for specific situations and they require special infrastructural support. We argue for faulttolerance techniques that can be readily implemented using a generic agent shell with minimal or no modification to the agent infrastructure. We propose that theories from multi-agent systems literature can be effectively combined with basic fault-tolerance principles to design robust multi-agent systems. In particular, we argue that (1) teamwork may be used to create...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: AGENTS
• Authors: Sanjeev Kumar, Philip R. Cohen
• Keywords: AGENTS 2000, Multi-agent Systems, Multi-agent Systems Deals, Robust Multi-agent Systems, Security Privacy