Exploring Robustness in the Context of Organizational Self-design

Robustness is the ability of a multiagent system to recover from failures and exceptions. In particular, the system should be able to recover from task and agent failures and the failure of any single agent or group of agents should allow the graceful, predictable degradation of performance. Hence, designing robust systems is a critical challenge facing many multiagent designers. Organizational Self-Design (OSD) has been proposed as an approach to constructing suitable organizations at runtime in which the agents are responsible for constructing their own organizational structures. OSD has also been shown to be especially suited for environments that are dynamic and semi-dynamic. However, the problem of making these self-designed organizations robust is still an open research problem that has not been studied to any considerable extent. In this paper, we focus on developing and evaluating robustness mechanisms that can be used by the agents in conjunction with OSD.