An experimental evaluation of domain-independent fault handling services in open multi-agent systems

A critical challenge to creating effective open multi-agent systems is allowing them to operate effectively in the face of potential failures. We present an experimental evaluation of a set of domain-independent services designed to handle the failure modes ("exceptions") that can occur in such environments, applied to the well-known "Contract Net" multi-agent system coordination protocol. We show that these services can produce substantially more effective fault handling behavior than standard existing techniques, while allowing simpler agent implementations.