Experimental Evaluation of Domain-Independent Fault Handling Services in Open Multi-Agent Systems

摘要

A critical challenge to creating effective open multi-agent systems is allowing them to operate effectively in the face of potential failures. In this paper, we present an experimental evaluation of a set of domain- independent services designed to handle the failure modes ('exceptions') that can occur in such environments, applied to the well-known 'Contract Net' multi- agent system coordination protocol. We show that these services can produce substantially more effective fault-handling behavior than standard existing techniques, while allowing simpler agent implementations.