Title: Flexible fault tolerance in distributed enterprise communities

Authors: Mihail Ionescu

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, University Politehnica Bucharest, 313 Splaiul Independentei, Bucharest, Romania

Abstract: We are witnessing the birth of the digital enterprise, in which many of the enterprise operations will be performed by independent software programs or by programs acting on behalf of humans. The agents are complex software entities, that should be able to maintain a state that survives failures. The classic solution is to use a relational database (such as Oracle), possibly replicated, to save the states of the agents in a manner that can survive failures and implement the communal invariants inside the database. In this paper we present a flexible, yet robust frame-work in which the interactions of the agents that work in a given community are governed by a given law that is enforced in a distributed manner. We provide several options to handle failures, maintaining the consistency of the states. The implementation is based on the distributed coordination and control mechanism called Law-Governed Interaction (LGI).

Keywords: flexible fault tolerance; law governed interaction; digital enterprise; software failure; hardware failure; distributed coordination and control; agent-based systems; multi-agent systems; MAS.

DOI: 10.1504/IJGUC.2012.051423

International Journal of Grid and Utility Computing, 2012 Vol.3 No.4, pp.224 - 232

Received: 26 May 2011
Accepted: 23 Sep 2011

Published online: 20 Dec 2014 *

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