The work reported in this paper is motivated towards validating an alternative approach for fault tolerance over traditional methods like checkpointing that constrain efficacious fault tolerance. Can agent intelligence be used to achieve fault tolerant parallel computing systems? If so, "What agent capabilities are required for fault tolerance?", "What parallel computational tasks can benefit from such agent capabilities?" and "How can agent capabilities be implemented for fault tolerance?" need to be addressed. Cognitive capabilities essential for achieving fault tolerance through agents are considered. Parallel reduction algorithms are identified as a class of algorithms that can benefit from cognitive agent capabilities. The Message Passing Interface is utilized for implementing an intelligent agent based approach. Preliminary results obtained from the experiments validate the feasibility of an agent based approach for achieving fault tolerance in parallel computing systems.
@cite_14: Mobile agent technology is a promising paradigm for a myriad of real world applications. Owing to their tremendous capabilities, multiagent systems have been scoped in a large number of applications. However issues related to fault tolerance can hamper the suitability of mobile agents in these real world systems. In this paper we have proposed an infrastructure which provides agent fault tolerance. An algorithm similar to the sliding window model ensures a fault tolerant behavior. Different types of agents, work in collaboration to provide the desired system behavior by tolerating faults. The proposed infrastructure will be applicable in a variety of systems including, ecommerce, online banking etc. With the increasing market of electronic commerce it becomes an interesting aspect to use autonomous mobile agents for electronic business transactions.
@cite_4: One of the main characteristics of multiagent systems (MAS) is fault tolerance. When an agent is unavailable for some reason, another agent with similar capabilities can theoretically compensate for this loss. The system can be designed not only for this kind of fault tolerance but also for others. Many key aspects of fault tolerance in MAS are described in this correspondence including social knowledge and physical distribution. We present a MAS framework that has been designed for control applications, in which fault tolerance and flexibility are key parts of the system
@cite_0: Multi agent systems (MAS) are expected to be involved in futuristic technologies. Agents require some execution environment in which they can publish their service interfaces and can provide services to other agent. Such execution environment is called agent platform (AP). From a technical point of view any abnormal behavior of platform can distress agents residing on that platform. That's why it is necessary to provide a suitable architecture for the AP which should not only provide fault tolerance but also scalability features. There also exist some management components within the platform, which provide services to application agents. All the agents within MAS are managed by agent management system (AMS) which is the mandatory supervisory authority of any AP. To be more scalable, a single agent platform can be distributed over several machines which not only provides load balancing but also fault tolerance depending upon the distributed architecture of the AP. In existing systems, AMS is centralized i.e. it exists on one machine. With centralized AMS, this infrastructure lacks fault tolerance, which is a key feature of high assurance. Absence of fault tolerance is the main reason for the small number of deployments of MAS. Failure of AMS leads towards abnormal behavior in the distributed platform. This paper proposes virtual agent cluster (VAC) paradigm which strongly supports decentralized AMS to achieve fault tolerance in distributed AP. VAC provides fault tolerance by using separate communication layers among different machines. Experiments show that it improves performance, brings autonomy and supports fault recovery along with load balancing in distributed AP.
@cite_5: The growing importance of multi-agent applications and the need for a higher quality of service in these systems justify the increasing interest in fault-tolerant multi-agent systems. In this article, we propose an original method for providing dependability in multi-agent systems through replication. Our method is different from other works because our research focuses on building an automatic, adaptive and predictive replication policy where critical agents are replicated to avoid failures. This policy is determined by taking into account the criticality of the plans of the agents, which contain the collective and individual behaviors of the agents in the application. The set of replication strategies applied at a given moment to an agent is then fine-tuned gradually by the replication system so as to reflect the dynamicity of the multi-agent system.
@cite_10: This paper proposes a new multi-agent platform for Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) Systems. Several multi-agent platforms exist to deal with different problems but none of them to deal with control systems tolerant to faults using the Matlab Simulinkreg environment, which is in our days the scientific bench to this kind of research. When dealing with large-scale complex networked control systems (NCS), designing FTC systems is a very difficult task due to the large number of sensors and actuators spatially distributed and network connected. To solve this issue, the FTC platform presented in this paper uses simple and verifiable principles coming mainly from a decentralized design based on causal modelling partitioning of the NCS and distributed computing using multi- agent systems paradigm, allowing the use of agents with well established FTC methodologies or new ones developed taking into account the NCS specificities.
Research on multi-agent based fault tolerance is reported in @cite_4 @cite_10 @cite_5 @cite_0 @cite_14 . Though research has been pursued on multi-agents focusing on fault tolerance, it is surprising that there has been little effort towards extending and implementing such ideas for large scale parallel computing systems.