Multi-agent technology for fault tolerant and flexible control

Abstract

One of the main characteristics of multi-agent systems (MAS) is fault tolerance. When an agent is unavailable for some reason, another agent with similar capabilities can theoretically compensate for this loss. Many key aspects of fault tolerance in MAS are described in this chapter including social knowledge, physical distribution, agent development, and validation. Therefore, the focus is not only on a fault tolerant agent platform with necessary services (e.g., fault tolerant social knowledge), but also on the design that can significantly reduce mistakes in agent programming and validation that can discover faults that manifest as failures during the testing phase. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.