Structured Coordination Spaces for Fault Tolerant Mobile Agents

Exception handling has proved to be the most general fault tolerance technique as it allows effective application-specific recovery. If exception handling is to make the programmer's work more productive and less error-prone, however, it requires adequate support from programming and execution environments. Scoping is a dynamic structuring technique which makes it easier for developers to deal with the complexity of system execution by narrowing down the context visible to individual system components.This study is specifically concerned with scoping that supports error confinement and allows system error recovery to be limited to the area confining the error. The approach we propose is designed to assist in rigorous development of structured multi-level fault tolerant agent systems.