Towards reliable multi-agent systems: An adaptive replication mechanism

Abstract. Distributed cooperative applications (e.g., e-commerce) are now increasingly being designed as a set of autonomous entities, named agents, which interact and coordinate (thus named a multi-agent system). Such applications are often very dynamic: new agents can join or leave, they can change roles, strategies, etc. This high dynamicity creates new challenges to the traditional approaches of faulttolerance. In this paper, we will focus on crash failures, with usual preventive approaches by replication. But, as criticality of agents may evolve during the course of computation and problem solving, static design (as, e.g., for critical database servers, well identified at design time) is not appropriate. Thus we need to dynamically and automatically identify the most critical agents and to adapt their replication strategies (e.g., active or passive, number of replicas), in order to maximize their reliability and their availability. In this paper, we describe a prototype architect...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: MAGS
• Authors: Zahia Guessoum, Jean-Pierre Briot, Nora Faci, Olivier Marin
• Keywords: Critical Database Servers, MAGS 2010, Multi-agent System, Usual Preventive Approaches