Quality assessment for multiple server cooperating systems

Abstract

Multiple agent systems are being used increasingly in various applications, including real time applications and safety critical systems. Many of these applications have a soft real time constraints and fuzzy rather than binary correctness criteria for the output value. Also, a principal characteristic of such systems is the trade off between using an efficient but less accurate strategy or a sophisticated but more time consuming strategy. We develop methods for assessing the quality of these systems in terms of the timeliness and accuracy of the output to aid decision making. We consider two commonly used coordination structures, parallel and pipeline structures. We also propose some adaptive schemes for increasing the quality of the system.