2003 IEEE/WIC International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT'03)
Improving Fault-tolerance in MAS with Dynamic Proxy Replicate Groups
Halifax, Canada
October 13-October 17
ISBN: 0-7695-1931-8
This paper presents a technique for replicating agents in a multi-agent system (MAS) with a goal of improving the fault-tolerance of the system. Replicating agents, or forming a replicate group, will always add complexity and overhead to a system. To mitigate these effects passive replication and a proxy agent is used to represent and manage the group. So that a new single point of failure (the proxy) is not created, the proxy is dynamic and can move to any agent in the replicate group. An implementation and experimentation is presented which shows that the technique is viable.