The Challenge of Real-Time Multi-Agent Systems for Enabling IoT and CPS

Techniques originating from the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) areas have extensively been applied to develop intelligent and pervasive systems such as assistive monitoring, feedback in telerehabilitation, energy management, and negotiation. Those application domains particularly include three major characteristics: intelligence, autonomy and real-time behavior. Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are one of the major technological paradigms that are used to implement such systems. However, they mainly address the first two characteristics, but miss to comply with strict timing constraints. The timing compliance is crucial for safety-critical applications operating in domains such as health-care and automotive. The main reasons for this lack of real-time satisfiability in MAS originate from current theories, standards, and technological implementations. In particular, internal agent schedulers, communication middlewares, and negotiation protocols have been identified as co-factors inhibiting the real-time compliance. This paper provides an analysis of such MAS components and pave the road for achieving the MAS compliance with strict timing constraints, thus fostering reliability and predictability.