Fault tolerance in scalable agent support systems: integrating DARX in the AgentScape framework

Abstract

Open multi-agent systems need to cope with the characteristics of the Internet, e.g., dynamic availability of computational resources, latency, and diversity of services. Large-scale multi-agent systems employed on wide-area distributed systems are susceptible to both hardware and software failures. This paper describes AgentScape, a multi-agent system support environment, DARX, a framework for providing fault tolerance in large scale agent systems, and a design for the integration of the two.