Stability and control of agent ecosystems

ABSTRACT

The problem of balancing supply and demand is not a new problem for multi-agent systems (MAS). Achieving a balance between the demand for jobs of a certain kind and the supply of agents to perform these jobs is critical to system performance and stability. An insufficient number of agents forces jobs to accumulate over time, preventing the system from benefiting from the parallel nature of the networked MAS. On the other hand an excessive number of agents slow the system down with unnecessary processing and communications overhead. This problem is amplified if the agent system is running over a mobile ad hoc network (MANET), since such networks may be composed of lightweight devices that are restricted in terms of processing power, memory, available bandwidth and battery power.

REFERENCES

• 1: Vincent Cicirello , Maxim Peysakhov , Gustave Anderson , Gaurav Naik , Kenneth Tsang , William Regli , Moshe Kam, Designing Dependable Agent Systems for Mobile Wireless Networks, IEEE Intelligent Systems, v.19 n.5, p.39-45, September 2004 [doi>10.1109/MIS.2004.41]
• 2: M. Peysakhov, V. Cicirello, W. Regli. Ecology based decentralized agent management system. Proc. FAABS, 2004.
• 3: E. Sultanik et al. Implementing secure mobile agents on ad hoc wireless network. In Proc. of IAAI, pp. 129--36, 2003.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques

Keywords:
P2P, agents & complex systems, agents & networks, computational ecosystems, grid, semantic web, stability theory, web agents, web services