Multiagent technology for fault tolerance and flexible control

One of the main characteristics of multiagent systems (MAS) is fault tolerance. When an agent is unavailable for some reason, another agent with similar capabilities can theoretically compensate for this loss. The system can be designed not only for this kind of fault tolerance but also for others. Many key aspects of fault tolerance in MAS are described in this correspondence including social knowledge and physical distribution. We present a MAS framework that has been designed for control applications, in which fault tolerance and flexibility are key parts of the system