  Organization and coordination of agents within large-scale, complex,
distributed environments is one of the primary challenges in the field of
multi-agent systems. A lot of interest has surfaced recently around self-*
(self-organizing, self-managing, self-optimizing, self-protecting) agents. This
paper presents polymorphic self-* agents that evolve a core set of roles and
behavior based on environmental cues. The agents adapt these roles based on the
changing demands of the environment, and are directly implementable in computer
systems applications. The design combines strategies from game theory,
stigmergy, and other biologically inspired models to address fault mitigation
in large-scale, real-time, distributed systems. The agents are embedded within
the individual digital signal processors of BTeV, a High Energy Physics
experiment consisting of 2500 such processors. Results obtained using a SWARM
simulation of the BTeV environment demonstrate the polymorphic character of the
agents, and show how this design exceeds performance and reliability metrics
obtained from comparable centralized, and even traditional decentralized
approaches.
