An Operational Analysis of Agent Relationships

As elaborated in the previous chapter, fundamental to the operation of multi-agent systems is the concept of cooperation and engagement between individual agents. If single-agent systems can both cooperate and engage others, they can exploit the capabilities and functionality of others to achieve their own individual goals. Once this is achieved, then such systems can potentially move beyond the advantages of robustness in traditional distributed systems in the face of individual component failure since components can be replaced and cooperation configurations realigned. In principle then, the multi-agent system paradigm allows the specific expertise and competence of different agents to complement each other so that in addition to general resilience, the overall system exhibits significantly greater functionality than individual components.