Basic Characteristics of a Macroscopic Measure for Detecting Abnormal Changes in a Multiagent System

Multiagent application systems must deal with various changes in both the system and the system environment at runtime. Generally, such changes have undesirable negative effects on the system. To manage and control the system, it is important to observe and detect negative effects using an appropriate observation function of the system’s behavior. This paper focuses on the design of this function and proposes a new macroscopic measure with which to observe behavioral characteristics of a runtime multiagent system. The proposed measure is designed as the variance of fluctuation of a macroscopic activity factor of the whole system, based on theoretical analysis of the macroscopic behavioral model of a multiagent system. Experiments are conducted to investigate basic characteristics of the proposed measure, using a test bed system. The results of experiments show that the proposed measure reacts quickly and increases drastically in response to abnormal changes in the system. Hence, the proposed measure is considered a measure that can be used to detect undesirable changes in a multiagent system.