Economically Inspired Self-healing Model for Multi-Agent Systems

Self-healing in fault tolerant multi-agent systems is the system ability to automatically detect, diagnose, and repair the faults. However, most of the available solutions are fragile in incomplete, uncertain, and dynamic situations. This paper proposes a novel economically inspired self-healing model for fault tolerant Multi-Agent Systems where the agents are self-interested autonomic elements collaborate to achieve fault tolerance as a given high-level objective of the system. It is an effective solution for dynamic situations with a high possibility of uncertainty. The proposed model is in fact toward responding the challenge of negotiation theory for autonomic systems introduced by IBM. In particular, it is an inspiration of general explanation of Communism, Socialism, and Capitalism. Extensive experiments illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed social approach in comparison to the cases of no help situation, using purely redundant components, and helping without using a social value.