Interaction laws for dependability explicit computing in open multi-agent systems

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© The Institution of Engineering and Technology
Published 29/07/2012

Abstract

In an open multi-agent system (MAS), agent autonomy and heterogeneity may possibly exploit cooperation, leading the system to an undesirable state. Since an MAS has no central control, a coordination mechanism must be developed to allow agents to fulfill their design goals. It is proposed to incorporate the dependability explicit computing (DepEx) ideas into a law-governed approach in order to build a dependable open MAS. The authors show that the law specification can explicitly incorporate dependability concerns, collect data and publish them in a metadata registry. This data can be used to realise DepEx and, for example, it can help to guide design and runtime decisions. The advantages of using a law-governed approach are (i) the explicit specification of the dependability concerns; (ii) the automatic collection of the dependability metadata reusing the infrastructure of the mediators presenting in law-governed approaches; and (iii) the ability to specify reactions to undesirable situations, thus preventing service failures.

Inspec keywords: open systems; legislation; multi-agent systems

Other keywords: open multi-agent systems; interaction laws; law-governed approach; metadata registry; dependability explicit computing

Subjects: Legal aspects of computing; Distributed systems software; Expert systems and other AI software and techniques

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