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Robustness to Lost Messages

In order to meet the challenge raised by unreliable communication leading to lost messages, agents must not depend on communication to act. Communication should be structured so that it helps agents update their world and internal states. But agents should not stop acting while waiting for communications from teammates. As brought up in [10], such a case could cause infinite looping if a critical teammate fails to respond for any reason. In the same way that agents continue acting while waiting for communicate-delay to expire, agents must do their best to maintain accurate world and internal states without help from teammates and continue acting while waiting for responses from teammates.



Peter Stone
Mon Nov 24 11:31:14 EST 1997