Speculative computation by abduction under incomplete communication environments

We present a method of problem solving in multi-agent systems when communication between agents is not guaranteed. To solve the problem of incomplete communication, we propose a method using abduction. The idea is as follows. When communication is delayed or failed, then we use a default hypothesis as a tentative answer and continue computation. When some response is obtained, we check consistency of the response and the current computation. If the response is consistent, then we continue the current computation, or else if the response is inconsistent, we seek an alternative computation. This way of computation is called speculative computation, since computation using a tentative answer would lead to a significant advantage if it succeeds. In this paper, we restrict our attention to a master-slave multi-agent system and propose an implementation of speculative computation and show that abduction plays an important role in speculative computation.