Towards Fault-Tolerant Robust Self-Organizing Multi-agent Systems in Intersections without Traffic Lights

• Main Authors: Chaaban, Y., Hahner, J., Muller-Schloer, C.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Automobiles; Control systems; Coordination; Fault tolerant systems; Mobile robots; Multi-Agent Systems; Multiagent systems; Organic Computing; Remotely operated vehicles; Resource management; Road accidents; Robustness; Self-organisation; Vehicle safety
• DOI: 10.1109/ComputationWorld.2009.117

The behavioural intelligence can be seen as a mixture of flexibility, robustness and adaptiveness of behaviour. This mixture is however the key idea of developing today's technical systems which use the Organic Computing (OC) concept. The Organic Computing initiative uses life-like properties such as self-organisation, self-optimisation and self-configuration towards building those systems as flexible, robust, and adaptive systems. Robust system shall behave or act appropriately according to situational needs. But this is not guaranteed in novel systems which have their complexity and whose environment is changing dynamically. In this paper, a new concept is investigated to keep a multi-agent system robust when deviations occur in the system behaviour.This concept introduces a robust hybrid central/self-organizing muti-agent system solving the conflict between a central planning algorithm and the autonomy of the agents. Here, the autonomy is recognized as a deviation from the plan of the central algorithm, if the agents are not respecting this plan. The scenario used in this work is a traffic intersection without traffic lights. This scenario offers a lot of cases that can be used to verify the new investigated concept.