The Adaptive Agent Architecture: Achieving Fault-Tolerance Using Persistent Broker Teams

Brokers are used in many multi-agent systems for locating agents, for routing and sharing information, for managing the system, and for legal purposes, as independent third parties. However, these multi-agent systems can be incapacitated and rendered non-functional when the brokers become inaccessible due to failures such as machine crashes, network breakdowns, and process failures that can occur in any distributed software system. We propose that the theory of teamwork can be used to create robust brokered architectures that can recover from broker failures, and we present the Adaptive Agent Architecture (AAA) to show the feasibility of this approach. The AAA brokers form a team with a joint commitment to serve any agent that registers with the broker team as long as the agent remains registered with the team. This commitment enables the brokers to substitute for each other when needed. A multiagent system based on the AAA can continue to work despite broker failures as long as there...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ICMAS
• Authors: Sanjeev Kumar, Philip R. Cohen, Hector J. Levesque
• Keywords: Broker Failures, Broker Teams, ICMAS 2000, Intelligent Agents, Multi-agent System