Interaction Monitoring and Termination Detection for Agent Societies: Preliminary Results

For large-scale and complex societies of agents monitoring and control are important to both agent designers and society administrators. Specifically, interaction monitoring and termination detection are of importance in optimising performance of a system and keeping users up-to-date on progress. Both monitoring and termination detection are well-studied problems for distributed object systems. In this paper, we investigate how these approaches can be applied to agent systems. We present a novel algorithm, which takes advantage of a monitor’s additional information on partial behaviour specifications of the agents to derive observable termination criteria. We sketch an implementation and qualitatively compare our novel algorithm to the existing distributed systems approaches and propose future experimental work.