On Fault Tolerance in Law-Governed Multi-Agent Systems

International audience The dependability of open multi-agent systems is a particular concern, notably because of their main characteristics as decentralization and no single point of control. This paper describes an approach to increase the availability of such systems through a technique of fault tolerance known as agent replication, and to increase their reliability through a mechanism of agent interaction regulation called law enforcement mechanism. Therefore, we combine two frameworks: one for law enforcement, named XMLaw, and another for agent adaptive replication, named DimaX, in which the decision of replicating an agent is based on a dynamic estimation of its criticality. Moreover, we will describe how we can reuse some of the information expressed by laws in order to help at the estimation of agent criticality, thus providing a better integration of the two frameworks. At the end of the paper, we recommend a means to specify criticality monitoring variation through a structured argumentation approach that documents the rationale around the decisions of the law elements derivation.