ARTS: agent-oriented robust transactional system

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the ARTS (Agent-oriented Robust Transactional System) model, which applies transaction concepts to provide agent developers with high-level support for agent system robustness and reliability. ARTS abstractly considers agents as executors of encapsulated task entities which comply with a set of execution constraints on both normative execution and compensation (repair) semantics. ARTS then defines the task interface in terms of predictable terminating states to support a contract-like interaction among agents. In conjunction with this encapsulation of task semantics, ARTS defines a model for specifying scoped compensation and exception-handling plans for a given task, and for systematically selecting and executing these plans --- triggered by subtask events --- so that the enclosing task semantics are enforced. These capabilities together define a model that reduces design complexity while increasing system robustness, by allowing an agent developer to compose recursively-defined, atomically-handled tasks.

REFERENCES

• 1: Paul C. Attie , Munindar P. Singh , Amit P. Sheth , Marek Rusinkiewicz, Specifying and Enforcing Intertask Dependencies, Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, p.134-145, August 24-27, 1993
• 2: P. Busetta, J. Bailey, and K. Ramamohanarao. A reliable computational model for BDI agents. In 1st International Workshop on Safe Agents, held in conjunction with AAMAS'03, 2003.
• 3: Panos K. Chrysanthis , Krithi Ramamritham, Synthesis of extended transaction models using ACTA, ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), v.19 n.3, p.450-491, Sept. 1994 [doi>10.1145/185827.185843]
• 4: A. Unruh, J. Bailey, and K. Ramamohanarao. Managing semantic compensation in a multiagent system. In COOPIS '04 (LNCS 3290), 2004., pages 245--263, Agia Napa, 2004.
• 5: Amy Unruh , James Bailey , Kotagiri Ramamohanarao, A Logging-Based Approach for Building More Robust Multi-agent Systems, Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on Intelligent Agent Technology, p.342-349, December 18-22, 2006 [doi>10.1109/IAT.2006.12]
• 6: A more detailed description of ARTS can be found at http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~minwang/publications.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
        I.2.11 Distributed Artificial Intelligence

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures
      D.2.4 Software/Program Verification

General Terms:
Design, Languages, Reliability, Theory

Keywords:
agent programming language, robustness, transaction