Using design metrics for predicting system flexibility

Abstract

While multiagent systems have been extolled as dynamically configurable and capable of emergent behavior, these qualities can be a drawback. When the system changes so that it no longer achieves its goals, emergent behavior is undesirable. Giving agents the autonomy to adapt and then expecting them to adapt only in acceptable ways requires rigorous design analyses. In this paper, we propose metrics for determining system flexibility at design time. Our approach is based on organization-based multiagent systems, which allows multiagent systems to adapt within a preset structure. We tailored the Bogor model checker to efficiently analyze the adaptive behaviors of these systems and to determine their properties such as fault-tolerance and cost-efficiency. We develop state-space coverage metrics to allow designers to make informed trade-offs at design-time between computational cost and system flexibility. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.