Detection of Overworked Agents in INGENIAS

Overworking behaviors appear in multi-agent systems communication quite often. This occurs when an agent receives many messages in a short period of time. As the agent pays attention to the large amount of messages it worsens its performance, causing the system’s performance to worsen as well. The reasons for this behaviors are varied and depend on the nature of the messages: an agent that sends messages to the same agent when it should have sent it to a group of agents in a balanced way; an agent that does not receive a quick response becomes impatient and keep on sending the same message to the same agent until it gets a response, and so on. This article presents a technique that detects the overworked agents in INGENIAS with a new metric and efficiently measures it with a new version of the INGENIAS Development Kit. The experimentation of this technique advocates that the existence of overworked agents is strongly related with the quality of service of multi-agent systems.