Generic fault-tolerant layer supporting publish/subscribe messaging in mobile agent 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.