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Robustness, through fault tolerance, is a property often put forward in order to advocate MAS. The question is: What is the first step to be fault tolerant? Obviously the answer is: to know faults. The claim of this paper is that existing fault classification suitable for distributed systems does not fit completely MAS needs because of autonomy, the main characteristic of their components. Actually autonomy is the very distinctive concept of agents and has unquestionable worthwhile properties. But do these properties have no compensation? After a short presentation of the fault classification which prevails in fault tolerance community, the paper will show that autonomy induces a need for significant extension to this classification. It will then make a special review of this extension and present some expectations with regard to the programing of fault tolerant MAS.

Abstract. We are interested in understanding and simulating how humans elaborate plans in situations where knowledge is incomplete and how they interact to obtain missing information. Our human interaction model is based on the speech act theory to model the utterances and it uses timed automata to describe the dynamics of the dialogs. Our human planning model is implemented as a hierarchical blackboard architecture which manages opportunistic planning. The system BDIggy we propose, is a concurrent implementation of the planning model and the interaction model through the BDI concept. This system is used to simulate the human processes during cooperative problem solving.