MAS-td: An Approach to Termination Detection of Multi-agent Systems

Abstract

Current multi-agent systems (MASs) don’t include the detection of their termination. Without such detection, the MAS will be either incomplete or incoherent. It is incomplete if it is a MAS lacking the detection of its termination. It is incoherent if it is other kind of systems than a MAS even if it terminates correctly. The problem of termination detection is borrowed from distributed systems where several solutions are proposed and/or improved. However, few works deal with this problem in the MAS context. In such context, the proposed solutions don’t meet MASs requirements. This paper proposes MAS-td approach to the problem of termination detection in the MAS context. MAS-td improves the probe algorithm and meets the MASs requirements.KeywordsDistributed SystemsDistributed Termination DetectionMulti-Agent Systems