There is an increasing interest in developing automated systems that are able to operate in a dynamic and error-prone environment. For such autonomous systems, powerful diagnostic tools have to be used to detect possible faulty behaviour of the system without human intervention. Currently, the dominant and most successful approach to diagnosis for stand-alone systems is the model-based diagnosis approach.
Automated systems often operate in a distributive environment where other, related, systems are operating, sharing (and sometimes competing for) resources, plans and goals. Multi-agent systems technology tries to design and implement such autonomous systems (agents)operating in a common environment. It turns out that the dominant model-based diagnosis approach is not simply applicable in a distributed multi-agent context.
Research Aims
The current project therefore aims to adapt, extend and apply diagnosis methods and tools to such a distributed multi-agent system. More in particular, it aims:
- to extend the classical model-based diagnosis approach for single systems to distributed multi-agent based systems. The result will be a detailed description of a multi-agent architecture for diagnosis;
- to develop distributed, multi-agent based diagnostic techniques incorporating existing single-agent based techniques. As a result, a description and prototypical implementation of a multi-agent based diagnosis system will be delivered;
- to show the feasibility of the approach by applying it to a distributed air traffic control problem. The result will be a demonstrator for diagnosis and repair in a distributed agent-based system for arrival-departure scheduling. |
