Since its dawn as a discipline, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has focused on mimicking the human mental processes. As AI applications matured, the interest for employing them into real-world complex systems (i.e., coupling AI with Cyber-Physical Systems—CPS) kept increasing. In the last decades, the multi-agent systems (MAS) paradigm has been among the most relevant approaches fostering the development of intelligent systems. In numerous scenarios, MAS boosted distributed autonomous reasoning and behaviors. However, many real-world applications (e.g., CPS) demand the respect of strict timing constraints. Unfortunately, current AI/MAS theories and applications only reason “about time” and are incapable of acting “in time” guaranteeing any timing predictability. This paper analyzes the MAS compliance with strict timing constraints (real-time compliance)—crucial for safety-critical applications such as healthcare, industry 4.0, and automotive. Moreover, it elicits the main reasons for the lack of real-time satisfiability in MAS (originated from current theories, standards, and implementations). In particular, traditional internal agent schedulers (general-purpose-like), communication middlewares, and negotiation protocols have been identified as co-factors inhibiting real-time compliance. To pave the road towards reliable and predictable MAS, this paper postulates a formal definition and mathematical model of real-time multi-agent systems (RT-MAS). Furthermore, this paper presents the results obtained by testing the dynamics characterizing the RT-MAS model within the simulator MAXIM-GPRT. Thus, it has been possible to analyze the deadline miss ratio between the algorithms employed in the most popular frameworks and the proposed ones. Finally, discussing the obtained results, the ongoing and future steps are outlined.

自一门学科诞生以来，人工智能（AI）一直致力于模仿人类的心理过程。随着AI应用程序的成熟，将其应用到现实世界中的复杂系统（即将AI与网络物理系统-CPS耦合）的兴趣不断增加。在过去的几十年中，多主体系统（MAS）范例已成为促进智能系统发展的最相关方法之一。在许多情况下，MAS促进了分布式自主推理和行为。但是，许多实际应用程序（例如CPS）都需要遵守严格的时序约束。不幸的是，当前的AI / MAS理论和应用仅推理“大约是时间”，并且无法采取行动“及时”保证任何时序可预测性。本文分析了严格的时序约束（实时合规性）对MAS的合规性，这对于诸如医疗保健，工业4.0和汽车等对安全性至关重要的应用而言至关重要。此外，它引起了MAS缺乏实时可满足性的主要原因（源自当前的理论，标准和实现）。特别是，传统的内部代理调度程序（类似通用），通信中间件和协商协议已被确认为抑制实时合规性的辅助因素。为了铺平通往可靠且可预测的MAS的道路，本文提出了实时多代理系统（RT-MAS）的正式定义和数学模型。此外，本文介绍了通过在仿真器MAXIM-GPRT中测试表征RT-MAS模型的动力学特性而获得的结果。因此，有可能分析在最流行的框架中使用的算法与所提出的算法之间的最后期限未命中率。最后，讨论获得的结果，概述了正在进行的步骤和将来的步骤。