CAMA: Structured Coordination Space and Exception Propagation Mechanism for Mobile Agents

Exception handling has been proven to be the most general fault tolerance technique as it allows effective application-specific recovery. If exception handling is to make programmer’s work more productive and less error-prone, however, it requires adequate support from the programming and execution environments. Scoping is a dynamic structuring technique which makes it easier for the developers to deal with the complexity of system execution by narrowing down the context visible for the individual system components. In this work we are specifically interested in scoping that supports error confinement and allows system error recovery to be limited to the area surrounding the error. The approach we propose aims at assisting in rigorous development of structured multilevel fault tolerant agent systems.