An architecture for exception management in multiagent systems

Multiagent Systems (MAS) are open, heterogeneous and distributed software systems of autonomous agents. The management of exception differs in MAS from what is known in usual engineering approaches, owing to specific situations to handle, such as the agent death, knowledge inconsistencies or collaborative handling. Existing work does not fully address the properties of MAS, notably agent autonomy, and the mechanisms related to exceptions are often ad hoc. In this article, we define the concept of agent exception so as to satisfy the characteristics of the agent paradigm, and we propose a MAS architecture to support design and development of agent systems with exception management facilities. This architecture provides designers with an exception mechanism integrated into usual agent models, so that the work left to the designer is the definition of application-dependent handlers that are automatically invoked by the architecture when required.