Mandrake: multiagent systems as a basis for programming fault-tolerant decentralized applications

Abstract

We conceptualize a decentralized software application as one constituted from autonomous agents that communicate via asynchronous messaging. Modern software paradigms such as microservices and settings such as the Internet of Things evidence a growing interest in decentralized applications. Constructing a decentralized application involves designing agents as independent local computations that coordinate successfully to realize the application’s requirements. Moreover, a decentralized application is susceptible to faults manifested as message loss, delay, and reordering. We contribute Mandrake, a programming model for decentralized applications that tackles these challenges without relying on infrastructure guarantees. Specifically, we adopt the construct of an information protocol that specifies messaging between agents purely in causal terms and can be correctly enacted by agents in a shared-nothing environment over nothing more than unreliable, unordered transport. Mandrake facilitates (1) implementing protocol-compliant agents by introducing a programming model; (2) transforming protocols into fault-tolerant ones with simple annotations; and (3) a declarative policy language that makes it easy to implement fault-tolerance in agents based on the capabilities in protocols. Mandrake’s significance lies in demonstrating a straightforward approach for constructing decentralized applications without relying on coordination mechanisms in the infrastructure, thus achieving some of the goals of the founders of networked computing from the 1970s.

Interaction-Oriented Software Engineering: Programming abstractions for autonomy and decentralization

“…We found that for different loss rates, our application-level retransmission over UDP strategy performed favorably compared to MQTT over TCP in terms of throughput measured as the numbers of interactions completed. Mandrake [23] goes further in proposing a policy language that takes advantage of information protocols and shows how to implement fault tolerance policies at the application level. Bungie [24] gives succinct annotations for augmenting information protocols with features that support fault tolerance.…”

A Generic Intelligent Agent Design Approach Based on Artificial Neural Networks

“…In the training step, the agents are in a scenario that simulates a four-lane highway while in the test step, they are located in unknown roads created based on random spline curves. Samuel H. Christie et al have proposed in [11] a MAS called Mandrake for programming fault tolerant decentralized applications. An unreusable agent architecture is present and each agent is manually built according to this architecture.…”