MAS and fault-management

Despite the considerable efforts spent on researching and developing multi-agent systems (MAS) there is a noticeable absence of deployed systems. In the past the MAS research community ignored this problem - arguing that it is not a genuine MAS problem and consequently of lesser importance than other unsolved issues like cooperation, coordination, negotiation and communication. However, as the field matures, empirical evaluations of techniques and systems are more commonly used and deployment issues like the management of a MAS become increasingly important. This paper introduces a generic framework for fault-management in MAS that has been successfully tested in a large scale MAS.