Fragility and Robustness in Multiagent Systems

Robustness is an important property of software systems, and the availability of proper feedback is seen as crucial to obtain it, especially in the case of systems of distributed and interconnected components. Multiagent Systems (MAS) are valuable for conceptualizing and implementing distributed systems, but the current design methodologies for MAS fall short in addressing robustness in a systematic way at design time. In this paper we outline our vision of how robustness in MAS can be granted as a design property. To this end, we exploit the notion of accountability as a mechanism to build reporting frameworks and, then, we describe how robustness is gained. We exemplify our vision on the JaCaMo agent platform.