Time Management Adaptability in Multi-Agent Systems

So far, the main focus of research on adaptability in multi-agent systems (MASs) has been on the agents’ behavior, for example on developing new learning techniques and more flexible action selection mechanisms. However, we introduce a different type of adaptability in MASs, called time management adaptability. Time management adaptability focuses on adaptability in MASs with respect to execution control. First, time management adaptability allows a MAS to be adaptive with respect to its execution platform, anticipating arbitrary and varying timing delays which can violate correctness. Second, time management adaptability allows the execution policy of a MAS to be customized at will to suit the needs of a particular application. In this paper, we discuss the essential aspects of time management adaptability: (1) we introduce time models as a means to explicitly capture the execution policy derived from the application’s execution requirements, (2) we classify and evaluate time management mechanisms which can be used to enforce time models, and (3) we describe a MAS execution control platform which combines both previous aspects to offer high level execution control.