An emotional decision making help provision approach to distributed fault tolerance in MAS

Fault is inevitable especially in MASS (multi-agent system) because of their distributed nature. This paper introduces a new approach for fault tolerance using help provision and emotional decision-making. Tasks that are split into criticality-assigned real-time subtasks according to their precedence graph are distributed among specialized agents with different skills. If a fault occurs for an agent in a way that it cannot continue its task, the agent requests help from the others with the same skill to redo or continue its task. Requested agents would help the faulty agent based on their nervousness on their own tasks compared to his task. It Is also possible for an agent to discover death of another agent, which has accepted one of his tasks, by polling. An implementation using JADE platform is presented in this paper and the results are reported.