A Theory to Devise Dependable Cooperative Encounters

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the question of how to characterize “fault tolerance” in cooperative agents. It is generally admitted that cooperating agents can achieve tasks that they could not achieve without cooperation. Nevertheless, cooperating agents can have “Achilles’ heels”, a cooperative encounter can eventually fail to achieve its tasks because of the collapse of a single agent. The contribution of this paper is the study of how cooperating agents are affected by dependability issues. Specifically, our objectives are twofold: to formally define the concepts of dependability in cooperative encounters, and to analyze the computational complexity of devising dependable cooperative encounters.