Abstract
Robustness, through fault tolerance, is a property often put forward in order to advocate MAS. The question is: What is the first step to be fault tolerant? Obviously the answer is: to know faults. The claim of this paper is that existing fault classification suitable for distributed systems does not fit completely MAS needs among other things because of autonomy, the main characteristic of their components. Actually autonomy is the very distinctive concept of agents and has unquestionable worthwhile properties. But do these properties have no compensation?
After these observations on the need for fault classification the question would be about its usages for fault tolerance.
To answer these questions the paper will, after a short presentation of the fault classification which prevails in fault tolerance community, show that autonomy induces a need for significant extension to this classification. It will then make a special review of this extension and present some expectations with regard to the programing of fault tolerant MAS and the behavior of two general fault handlers.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
d’Inverno, M., Luck, M.: Understanding autonomous interaction. In: Wahlster, W. (ed.) 12th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 529–533. John Wiley and Sons, Chichester (1996)
Hexmoor, H.: Stages of autonomy determination. In: IEEE Computer Society (ed.) IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, pp. 509–517 (2001)
Castelfranchi, C., Falcone, R.: From automaticity to autonomy: the frontier of artificial agents. In: Hexmoore, H., Castelfranchi, C., Falcone, R. (eds.) Agent Autonomy, pp. 103–136. Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht (2003)
Klein, M., Dellarocas, C.: Exception handling in agent systems. In: Etzioni, O., Müller, J.P., Bradshaw, J.M. (eds.) Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 1999), Seattle, WA, USA, pp. 62–68. ACM Press, New York (1999)
Platon, E., Sabouret, N., Honiden, S.: A definition of exceptions in agent-oriented computing. In: O’Hare, G., O’Grady, M., Dikenelli, O., Ricci, A. (eds.) Engineering Societies in the Agent World 2006 (2006)
Laprie, J.-C.: Dependable computing and fault tolerance: Concepts and terminology. In: 15th IEEE Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing (FTCS-15), Vuibert, pp. 2–11 (1985)
Fedoruk, A., Deters, R.: Improving fault-tolerance by replicating agents. In: Proceedings of the first international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems: part 2, Bologna, Italy, pp. 737–744. ACM Press, New York (2002)
Guessoum, Z., Faci, N., Briot, J.P.: Adaptive replication of large-scale multi-agent systems: towards a fault-tolerant multi-agent platform. In: Proceedings of the fourth international workshop on Software engineering for large-scale multi-agent systems, St. Louis, Missouri, pp. 1–6. ACM Press, New York (2005)
Chopinaud, C., Fallah-Seghrouchni, A.E., Taillibert, P.: Prevention of harmful behaviors within cognitive and autonomous agents. In: European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 205–209 (2006)
Dragoni, N., Gaspari, M.: Crash failure detection in asynchronous agent communication languages. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 13(3), 355–390 (2006)
Sabater, J., Sierra, C.: Review on computational trust and reputation models. Artificial Intelligence Review 24(1), 33–60 (2005)
de Weerdt, M., ter Mors, A., Witteveen, C.: Multi-agent planning: An introduction to planning and coordination. In: Handouts of the European Agent Summer School, pp. 1–32 (2005)
Avizienis, A., Laprie, J.C., Randell, B., Landwehr, C.: Basic concepts and taxonomy of dependable and secure computing. In: IEEE Computer Society (ed.) IEEE Transactions on dependable and secure computing, pp. 11–33 (2004)
Arlat, J., Crouzet, Y., Deswarte, Y., Fabre, J.C., Laprie, J.C., Powell, D.: Tolérance aux fautes. In: Akoka, I.W.J. (ed.) Encyclopédie de l’Informatique et des Systèmes d’Information, Vuibert, pp. 241–270 (2006)
Lin, T.H., Shin, K.G.: A bayesian approach to fault classification. In: ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review archive, vol. 18(1), pp. 58–66. ACM Press, New York (1990)
Hägg, S.: A sentinel approach to fault handling in multi-agent systems. In: Second Australian Workshop on Distributed AI in conjunction with the Fourth Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 181–195 (1996)
Potiron, K., Taillibert, P., Fallah-Seghrouchni, A.E.: Gestion des exceptions dans les conversations entre agents autonomes. In: Actes des Journées Francophones sur les Systèmes MultiAgent (JFSMA 2007), pp. 211–220 (2007)
Searle, J.R.: Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969)
FIPA: FIPA communicative act library specification. In for Intelligent Physical Agents, F. (ed.) Rapport technique (2000)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Potiron, K., Taillibert, P., El Fallah Seghrouchni, A. (2008). A Step Towards Fault Tolerance for Multi-Agent Systems. In: Dastani, M., El Fallah Seghrouchni, A., Leite, J., Torroni, P. (eds) Languages, Methodologies and Development Tools for Multi-Agent Systems. LADS 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5118. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85058-8_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85058-8_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-85057-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-85058-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)