Formal Specification of Substitutability Property for Fault-Tolerance in Reactive Autonomic Systems

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have been widely proposed and applied to various application domains, where traditional approaches are impractical, such as space exploration missions. MAS can offer greater redundancy, efficiency, and scalability; however, they also raise new challenges, such as complex and often unexpected emergent group behavior, which require a formal specification as well as verification. Therefore, we have proposed a formal approach, named Reactive Autonomic Systems Framework (RASF), based on category theory to tackle those challenges. In this paper, we focus on the formal specification of substitutability property for the fault-tolerance and illustrate our approach through a Mars-world case study implemented as MAS using JADEX.