Implementing Fault-Tolerant Services in Goal-Oriented Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

In this paper, findings and analysis detail the implementation of fault tolerance services into a goal-oriented multi-agent systems development platform. Fault tolerance services are used to provide replication-based fault tolerance policies (i.e. static and adaptive) to multi-agent systems. This approach provided flexibility and reusability to multi-agent systems because fault tolerance policies were implemented as reusable plan structures. Thus, whenever an agent was needed to be made fault-tolerant, plans for fault tolerance policies were simply activated by sending a request message.

Keywords

• availability
• fault tolerance
• multi-agent systems
• replication
• redundancy
• software agents