Intelligent agent technology provides a modern approach to the automation of intersystem processes. Cooperating agent systems permit information flow between host systems, without the need for direct interfaces. Agents facilitate large-scale dynamics by encapsulating messages and protocols, and defining behavior of the interaction processes. Because agents become integral to these processes, their reliability is an important contributor to overall mission reliability.
Data integrity is critical to the reliability of agent-based systems.
It affects both data owned by the agents and application data being exchanged. If agents have incorrect data or do not have needed data, opportunities for data loss and data corruption occur. Of course, some degree of hardware, communications, and on-board memory failure is to be expected. One hundred percent reliability would be too expensive to implement. Commonly used explicit fault tolerance methods provide a framework for high reliability, but must be generalized to accommodate today's loosely coupled architectures.