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Experience and prospects for various control strategies for self-replicating multi-agent systems

Published: 21 May 2006 Publication History

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 fault-tolerance. As relative importance of agents may evolve during the course of computation and problem solving,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. One important issue is then: what kind of information could be used to estimate which agents are most critical agents? In this paper, we will first introduce our prototype architecture for adaptive replication. Then, we will discuss various kinds of information and strategies to estimate criticality of agents: static dependences, dynamic dependences, roles, norms, and plans. Some preliminary measurements and future directions will also be presented.

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Cited By

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  • (2009)Self-Adaptation of Fault Tolerance Requirements Using ContractsProceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Volume 0210.1109/CSE.2009.192(245-253)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2009
  • (2009)Computing the fault tolerance of multi-agent deploymentArtificial Intelligence10.1016/j.artint.2008.11.007173:3-4(437-465)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2009
  • (2008)Dynamic resource allocation heuristics for providing fault tolerance in multi-agent systemsProceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Applied computing10.1145/1363686.1363705(66-70)Online publication date: 16-Mar-2008

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cover image ACM Conferences
SEAMS '06: Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Self-adaptation and self-managing systems
May 2006
102 pages
ISBN:1595934030
DOI:10.1145/1137677
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 21 May 2006

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Author Tags

  1. adaptive
  2. agent
  3. control
  4. criticality
  5. dependability
  6. dependence
  7. estimation
  8. fault-tolerance
  9. multi-agent system
  10. norm
  11. plan
  12. replication
  13. role
  14. strategy

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Cited By

View all
  • (2009)Self-Adaptation of Fault Tolerance Requirements Using ContractsProceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Volume 0210.1109/CSE.2009.192(245-253)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2009
  • (2009)Computing the fault tolerance of multi-agent deploymentArtificial Intelligence10.1016/j.artint.2008.11.007173:3-4(437-465)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2009
  • (2008)Dynamic resource allocation heuristics for providing fault tolerance in multi-agent systemsProceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Applied computing10.1145/1363686.1363705(66-70)Online publication date: 16-Mar-2008

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