Authors:
Katia Potiron
1
;
Patrick Taillibert
1
and
Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni
2
Affiliations:
1
Thales Systèmes Aéroportés, France
;
2
Laboratoire Informatique de Paris 6, France
Keyword(s):
Agent communication, Fault tolerance, Agent design, Autonomy, Fault handler.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agent Communication Languages
;
Agents
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems
;
Autonomous Systems
;
Distributed and Mobile Software Systems
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Multi-Agent Systems
;
Software Engineering
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
An agent can send a message and never receive a response, this is what we name the ”empty mailbox problem” this paper is concerned with. The causes of the problem can lie in low level layer as, for instance, in communication links, but also in the behavior of the autonomous entity the agent is interacting with, which can choose not to respond. The task is not easy, for the agents developer, to find what is to do in such cases. The proposed solution consists in a performative and the associated meta-protocol. This results into a generic method to handle the empty mailbox problem in the case of temporary faults. Some prospects are given to handle permanent faults.