Monitoring Agent Communication in Soft Real-Time Environments

Real-time systems can be defined as systems operating under specific timing constraints, either hard or soft ones. In principle, agent systems are considered inappropriate for such kinds of systems, due to the asynchronous nature of their communication protocols, which directly influences their temporal behavior. Nevertheless, multi-agent systems could be successfully employed for solving problems where failure to meet a deadline does not have serious consequences, given the existence of a fail-safe system mechanism. Current work focuses on the analysis of multi-agent systems behavior under such soft real-time constraints. To this end, ERMIS has been developed: an integrated framework that provides the agent developer with the ability to benchmark his/her own architecture and identify its limitations and its optimal timing behavior, under specific hardware/software constraints. A variety of MAS configurations have been tested and indicative results are discussed within the context of this paper.