Abstract

Application-level fault tolerance incurs significant development-time cost. FATMAD is a fault-tolerant multi-agent development framework that is built on top of a mobile agent platform (Jade) and provides development support for application level fault tolerance. FATMAD aims to satisfy the needs of two communities of users: agent application developers and fault-tolerant protocol developers. FATMAD is based on a generic fault-tolerant protocol whose refinements lead to a broad range of checkpoint and recovery protocols to be used in user applications. This, in turn, can significantly reduce the development time of fault-tolerant agent applications. FATMAD allows application developers to apply suitable protocols and customizable deployment configurations to their applications so that the characteristics and fault tolerance requirements of a particular application can be addressed. FATMAD implements common facilities that are required by different protocols. The protocol-specific parts in each protocol can be extended by protocol designers.