A decision-making based approach for fault-handling in multi-agent systems

This paper focuses on distributed fault recovery in agent-based systems by providing help for faulty members. In the presented method, if one faulty agent requests for help or agents are informed of fault in one of their teammates, they first decide if they are able to help or not. In the case that they are able to help and several help requests exist, helper agents specify a sequence of help actions through another distributed decision-making phase. The introduced fault clearing method is totally distributed in the sense that each helper agent makes its decisions by itself and no central or special agent exists in the system. In fact, the decision making process and the required information are designed such that the agents cooperate implicitly to prevent the system performance loss. The developed ideas are implemented in a simulated distributed control system. As it is shown, the proposed distributed fault-clearing method through reconfiguring the agents' roles is very effective.