Can Space Applications Benefit from Intelligent Agents?

The work reported in this paper proposes a Swarm-Array computing approach based on 'Intelligent Agents' to apply autonomic computing concepts to parallel computing systems and build reliable systems for space applications. Swarm-array computing is a swarm robotics inspired, novel computing approach considered as a path to achieve autonomy in parallel computing systems. In the intelligent agent approach, a task to be executed on parallel computing cores is considered as a swarm of autonomous agents. A task is carried to a computing core by carrier agents and can be seamlessly transferred between cores in the event of a predicted failure, thereby achieving self-* objectives of autonomic computing. The approach is validated on a multi-agent simulator.