Local scheduling in multi-agent systems ::getting ready for safety-critical scenarios

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have been supporting the development of distributed systems performing decentralized thinking and reasoning, automated actions, and regulating component interactions in unpredictable and uncertain scenarios. Despite the scientific literature is plenty of innovative contributions about resource and tasks allocation, the agents still schedule their behaviors and tasks by employing traditional general-purpose scheduling algorithms. By doing so, MAS are unable to enforce the compliance with strict timing constraints. Thus, it is not possible to provide any guarantee about the system behavior in the worst-case scenario. Thereby, as they are, they cannot operate in safety-critical environments. This paper analyzes the agents' local schedulers provided by the most relevant agent-based frameworks from a cyber-physical systems point of view. Moreover, it maps a set of agents' behaviors on task models from the real-time literature. Finally, a practical case-study is provided to highlight how such "MAS reliability" can be achieved