Resource Management and Adaptive Replication for Fault-Tolerant MAS

Abstract. Distributed cooperative applications are now increasingly being designed as MAS. Such applications may be massive, open and very dynamic: new agents can join or leave, they can change roles, strate-gies, etc. This characteristics create new challenges to the traditional approaches of fault-tolerance. In this paper, we focus on a replication-based preventive approach. The aim is to dynamically and automatically adapt the agent replication strategy (e.g. number of replicas and their location), in order to maximize the MAS reliability. We describe a nego-tiation protocol, supporting adaptive replication. This protocol provides a distributed solution that uses local decision but guarantees global MAS performances. We report on experimental results using a first implemen-tation of the protocol.