Authors:
Milovan Tosic
and
Arkady Zaslavsky
Affiliation:
School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Monash University, Australia
Keyword(s):
Reliability, Fault-tolerance, Agents, Multi-agent Systems, Publish/Subscribe Messaging, Web-services
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agent-Oriented Programming
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Software Agents and Internet Computing
;
Telecommunications
;
Wireless and Mobile Computing
;
Wireless and Mobile Technologies
;
Wireless Information Networks and Systems
Abstract:
With the introduction of clustered messaging brokers and the fault-tolerant Mobile Connector, we can guarantee the exactly-once consumption of messages by agents. The context-aware messaging allowed us to decrease the messaging overhead which has to be present in any fault-tolerant solution. This paper proposes a complete
fault-tolerant layer for multi-agent systems (EFTL) that does not restrict agent autonomy and mobility in any way. An application can choose if it wants EFTL support and that decision is based on support costs. A persistent publish/subscribe messaging model allows the creation of an external platform-independent fault-tolerant layer. In order to support the multi-agent platforms of different vendors, a large part of the application logic is moved from those platforms to an application server. We present the EFTL system architecture, the algorithm of exactly-once message consumption and the system’s performance analysis.