An Agent-Based Business Automated System With Self-Adjusting Visibility For Reliability

Hanh Pham * ^a and Yiming Ye<sup>b

a</sup> Department of Computer Science, State University of New York at New Paltz, 75 S Manheim Blvd. Suite 6, New Platz, NY 12561, USA
^b IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598, USA

Received 30 October 2002; revised 20 February 2003; accepted 28 February 2003. ; Available online 2 May 2003.

Abstract

This paper describes an agent-based model, called HAM, for business automation in large, distributed, and real-time systems. With resource bounds and time constraints, reliability and efficiency are difficult to achieve. We propose a self-restraining and self-stimulating control of agent interactions to meet the deadlines and to prevent agents from overloading system resources. The agent visibility and invisibility concepts are introduced and used to regulate the scopes of agent interactions and communications when it is needed. A mechanism, called DYVIREM, is designed to adjust agent visibility dynamically according to the deadlines and the resource limits. Through simulation experiments we also analyze the effects of agent visibility on the performance and on the quality of service of the proposed agent-based business model.

Author Keywords: Business automation; Software agents; Visibility; Multi-agent systems; Control; Interaction; Real-time; Reliability; Resource bounds; Time constraints

*Corresponding author. Tel.: +1.845.257.3574; Fax: +1-845.257.3996.

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