Validation of Biologically Inspired Tactics to Increase Multi-Agent System Resilience

Abstract

There is an urgent need to increase multi-agent systems’ resilience. Efforts, however, are hampered by three gaps: current approaches are case study specific, may depend on infrastructure investment, and are often unshared. In response to these needs, we propose 14 biologically inspired Tactics for individual agent design and communication protocols. The Tactics are generalizable and do not depend upon infrastructure investments. The Tactics are applied to a hybrid system dynamic and agent-based model of an electric motor manufacturing supply chain case study. The approach for applying each of the Tactics is clearly described to support future application. Tactic use successfully increased resilience by an average of 6.6%. By reporting a context-neutral solution approach to increase resilience, focusing on agent intervention, and clearly reporting the implementation to a supply chain case study, this article takes an important step toward our goal of using biologically inspired design to increase multi-agent system resilience.