Fault Tolerance through Interaction and Mutual Cooperation in Hierarchical Multi-Agent Systems

Rade Stanković, Maja Štula

2013

Abstract

Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) are well suited for development of complex, distributed systems. In its essence MAS is a distributed system that consists of multiple agents working together to solve common problems. Failure handling is an important property of large scale MAS because the failure rate grows with both the number of the hosts, deployed agents and the duration of agent’s task execution. Numerous approaches have been introduced to deal with some aspects of the failure handling. However, absence of centralized control and large number of individual intelligent components makes it difficult to detect and to treat errors. Risk of uncontrollable fault propagation is high and can seriously impact the performance of the system. Although existing research has been extensive, it still needs to attend the MAS failure handling problem in all its aspects, which makes this topic very interesting. We propose a concept of agent interaction that enables any hierarchical MAS to become fault tolerant, regardless of the used agent framework.

References

  1. Ahmad, H. F., Sun, G. and Mori, K., 2001. Autonomous Information Provision to Achieve Reliability for Users and Providers. s.l., IEEE Proc. of the Fifth International Symposium on ADS (ISADS01), pp.65-72.
  2. Ahmad, H. F., Sun, G. and Mori, K., 2003. Dynamic Information Allocation Through Mobile Agents to Achieve Load Balancing in Evolving Environment. s.l., IEEE Proc. of the Sixth International Symposium on ADS (ISADS03), pp.25-33.
  3. Almeida, A. d. L., Aknine, S., Briot, J.-. P. and Malenfant, J., 2006. Plan-based replication for fault-tolerant multi-agent systems. s.l., Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium.
  4. Anon., 2002. SLA Information Zone. [Online] Available at: http://www.sla-zone.co.uk/ [Accessed June 2011].
  5. Bellifemine, F. L., Caire, G. and Greenwood, D., 2007. Developing multi-agent systems with JADE. s.l., John Wiley & Sons, Inc..
  6. Briot, J.-P. and Ghédira, K., 2003. Déploiement des systemes multi-agents. s.l., Revue des Sciences et T echnologies de l'Information, hors série/JFSMA 2003.
  7. D.Mitrovic, Ivanovic, M., Budimac, Z. and Vidakovic, M., 2011. An overview of agent mobility in heterogeneous environments. s.l., Proceedings Of The Workshop On Applications Of Software AgentS.
  8. Dellarocas, M. and Klein, C., 1999. Exception Handling in Agent Systems. s.l., Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Seattle, WA.
  9. Faci, N., Guessoum, Z. and Marin, O., 2006. DimaX: a faulttolerant multi-agent platform. s.l., In Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Software engineering for large-scale multi-agent systems, pp. 13- 20.
  10. Fedoruk, A. and Deters, R., 2002. Improving faulttolerance by replicating agents. s.l., In Proc. AAMAS02, pp. 737-744, Bologna.
  11. Helsinger, A., Thome, M. and Wright, T., 2004. Cougaar: a scalable, distributed multi-agent architecture. s.l., In Preccedings of International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics pp. 1910-1917.
  12. Jennings, N. R., 2001. An agent based approach for building complex software systems. s.l., Communication of the ACM, 44(4) pp. 35-41.
  13. Johnson, J., 2009. Hypernetworks of Complex Systems; Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering. Complex Sciences, 4(pp. 364-375).
  14. Jurasovic, K., Kusek, M. and Jezic, G., 2009. Multi-agent service deployment in telecommunication networks. s.l., In Agent and multi-agent systems: technologies and applications, LCNS Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, pp. 560 - 569,.
  15. Khan, Z. et al., 2005. Decentralized architecture for fault tolerant multi agent system. s.l., In Proc. of Autonomous Decentralized Systems (ISADS), pp. 167-174..
  16. Kumar, S. and Cohen, P., 2000. Towards fault-tolerant multi-agent system architecture. s.l., In proceedings of the fourth international conference on Autonomous agents, pp459 - 466.
  17. Kumar, S., Cohen, P. R. and Levesque, H. J., 2000. The adaptive agent architecture: Achieving fault-tolerance using persistent broker teams. s.l., In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, Boston, MA.
  18. Marin, O., 2003. The DARX Framework: Adapting Fault Tolerance For Agent Systems. s.l.:THÈSE DE DOCTORAT DE L'UNIVERSITÉ DU HAVRE.
  19. McKee, B. and Varghese, G., 2010. Exploring Carrier Agents in Swarm-Array Computing. s.l., Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience, Volume 11, pp. 53-62.
  20. Mellouli, S., Moulin, B. and Mineau, G., 2004. Towards a modelling methodology for fault-tolerant multi-agent systems. s.l., In Informatica Journal 28, pp. 31-40.
  21. Mitrovic, D., Budimac, Z. and Vidakovic, M., 2010. Improving Fault-Tolerance of Distributed Multi-Agent Systems with Mobile Network-Management Agents. s.l., Proceedings of the International Multiconference on Computer Science and Information Technology pp. 217-222.
  22. Mladenovic, S., 2011. Interoperability in hierarchical and heterogeneous systems. s.l.:Doctoral thesis, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture in Split.
  23. Punithavathi, R. and Duraiswamy, K., 2010. A fault tolerant mobile agent information retrieval system. s.l., In Journal of computer science, Vol. 6, pp. 553 - 556.
  24. Ravasz, E. and Barabási, A. L., 2003. Hierarchical organization in complex networks. 67(2).
  25. Rudowsky, I., 2004. Intelligent Agents. New York, Proceedings of the Americas Conference on Information Systems, New York.
  26. Suguri, H., Kodama, E., Miyazaki, M. and Kaji, I., 2002. Assuring Interoperability between Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems with a Gateway Agent. s.l., Proceedings of the 7th IEEE International Symposium on High Assurance Systems Engineering.
  27. Sycara, K. P., 1998. Multiagent Systems. s.l., AI Magazine, American Association for Artificial Intelligence.
  28. Tanenbaum, A. S. and Steen, M. v., 2002. Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458: Prentice Hall.
  29. Torrel, J.-.C., Lattaud, C. and Heudin, J. -. C., 2007. Complex Stellar Dynamics using a hierarchical multi-agent mode. Erice, Italy, Modelling and simulation in science, Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Data Analysis in Astronomy pp.307-312.
  30. Varghese, B., McKee, G. and Alexandrov, V., 2010. Handling single node failures using agents in computer clusters. s.l., International Symposium on Performance Evaluation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (SPECTS).
  31. Wilensky, U., 1999. NetLogo Home Page. [Online] Available at: http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/ [Accessed 06 May 2012].
  32. Wilson, R. J., 1990. Graphs and heir use. s.l.:New Mathematical Library.
  33. Wooldridge, M., 1997. Agent based Software Engineering. s.l., IEE Proceedings of Software Engineering 144, pp: 26-37.
  34. Xu, P. and Deteis, R., 2005. Fault Management in Multi Agent Systems. s.l., In Proceedings of Symposium on Applications and the Internet.
  35. Yang, Z. et al., 2006. A multi-agent framework for power system automation. s.l., In International journal of innovations in energy systems and power, Vol. 1, No. 1.
  36. Zhang, Z., McCalley, J. D., Vishwanathan, V. and Honavar, V., 2004. Multiagent system solutions for distributed computing, communications, and data integration needs in the power industry. s.l., In Proceedings of the General Meeting of the IEEE Power Engineering Society, IEEE Press, pp. 45 - 49.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Stanković R. and Štula M. (2013). Fault Tolerance through Interaction and Mutual Cooperation in Hierarchical Multi-Agent Systems . In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART, ISBN 978-989-8565-38-9, pages 337-344. DOI: 10.5220/0004182003370344


in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart13,
author={Rade Stanković and Maja Štula},
title={Fault Tolerance through Interaction and Mutual Cooperation in Hierarchical Multi-Agent Systems},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART,},
year={2013},
pages={337-344},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004182003370344},
isbn={978-989-8565-38-9},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART,
TI - Fault Tolerance through Interaction and Mutual Cooperation in Hierarchical Multi-Agent Systems
SN - 978-989-8565-38-9
AU - Stanković R.
AU - Štula M.
PY - 2013
SP - 337
EP - 344
DO - 10.5220/0004182003370344