Towards Dependable Agent Systems

If an environment depends on the services of a multiagent system it should do so only if it can justifiably place reliance on this service. If so, the system appears to the environment reliable, or dependable. It is well-known that dependability should be designed right into a system rather than added as an afterthought. Particularly due to the high degree of distribution and the autonomy of agents, multiagent systems pose numerous and often novel challenges but also offer new opportunities to deal with dependability. This chapter examines the important issues and discusses how appropriate solutions can be associated with specific layers of the reference architecture of IV.4. Specifically, a distinction is made between unintentional and intentional failures, the former resulting in a suite of solutions referred to as error processing, the latter in measures called trust management.

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