Timing reliability for local schedulers in multi-agent systems

In the last decades, the use of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) resulted in being the most relevant approach to foster the development of systems performing distributed reasoning, automated/autonomous actions, and regulating component interactions in unpredictable and uncertain scenarios. The scientific community provided numerous innovative contributions about resource and task allocation seeking for optimal/sub-optimal solutions. The adoption of MAS in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is producing outstanding results. However, in current MAS, the actual task execution is still delegated to traditional general-purpose scheduling algorithms running within the agent (local scheduler of behaviors). The main consequence is the incapability to enforce compliance with strict timing constraints (i.e., the impossibility of providing any guarantee about the system’s behavior in the worst-case scenario). Therefore, the adoption of MAS is hampered, excluding significant application scenarios such as safety-critical environments. This paper proposes the schedulability analysis of various task-sets, that are feasible using real-time schedulers, on top of traditional general-purpose solutions. In particular, the study of deadline-missing rate occurring in general-purpose setups, evaluated on an agent-based simulator developed on OMNET++, named MAXIM-GPRT, is presented. The obtained results strengthen the motivations for adopting and adapting real-time scheduling mechanisms as the local scheduler within agents.