Improving fault-tolerance of distributed multi-agent systems with mobile network-management agents

Large-scale agent-based software solutions need to be able to assure constant delivery of services to end-users, regardless of the underlying software or hardware failures. Fault-tolerance of multi-agent systems is, therefore, an important issue. We present an easy and flexible way of introducing fault-tolerance to existing agent frameworks. The approach is based on two new types of mobile agents that manage efficient construction and maintenance of fault-tolerant multi-agent system networks, and implement a robust agent tracking technique.