Principled Monitoring of Distributed Agents for Detection of Coordination Failure

There is a very rich variety of systems of autonomous agents, be it software or robotic agents. In particular, multi-agent systems can include agents that may be part of a team and need to coordinate their actions during their distributed task execution. This coordination requires an agent to observe, i.e., to monitor, the other agents in order to detect a possible coordination failure of the team. Several researchers have addressed the problem of monitoring for single or multiple agent systems and have contributed successful, but mainly application-specific, approaches. In this paper, we aim at contributing a unifying, domain-independent statement of the distributed multi-agent monitoring problem. We define the problem in terms of a pre-defined desirable joint state and an observation-state mapping. Given a concrete joint observation during execution, we show how an agent can detect a possible coordination failure by processing the observation-state mapping and the desirable joint state. To illustrate the generality of our formalism, one of the main contributions of the paper, we represent several previously studied examples within our formalism. We note that basic failure detection algorithms can be computationally expensive. We further contribute an efficient method for failure detection that builds upon an off-line compilation of the principled relations introduced. We show empirical results that demonstrate this effectiveness.