Experience with Task/Allocation Coordination Primitive for Building SurvivableMulti-AgentSystems

A key goal in building survivable agent frameworks is to create application-level coordination primitives that fit naturally within the application's domain and are capable of being made robust and efficient by the agent framework. The Cougaar agent framework supports several types of application-level coordination primitives, including task/allocation. Under the DARPA-funded UltraLogproject, BBN used the Cougaar agent framework to create survivable agent societies based on these primitives. The Cougaar logistics application that was produced used the task/allocation coordination primitive to decompose work among multiple agents. Other coordination primitives were used to monitor and control the agent infrastructure itself. When combined and run together, the UltraLog societies were able to recover from a substantial, 45% infrastructure loss and were still able to complete their jobs with minimal impact on performance