A per-resource time-division slot protocol for exclusive tool access among concurrent software agents
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Software agents increasingly share tools that admit one mutation at a time, such as repositories, calendars, documents and browser sessions. Uncoordinated agents collide: with 4 to 16 writers on one object, the live Zotero API rejected 51 to 92% of writes as stale and Google Drive silently lost 70 to 95% of acknowledged updates. We propose a protocol modelled on time-division multiple access (TDMA): a coordinator orders mutation requests globally across per-tool slot queues, and each short slot is a lease whose grant issues a fencing token and validates the read set, so reasoning stays outside slots and stale plans are rejected before writing. We prove that writes with superseded tokens are rejected, that slot queues cannot deadlock and that waiting after admission is bounded, but not task liveness. Simulated with assumed agent timings (2 to 64 agents, three workloads), the protocol had no deadlocks and no stale or interfering writes in any of 3,780 primary and 13,860 sensitivity episodes. Against a global mutex it had lower 95th-percentile latency and higher utilisation in every cell with eight or more agents (16 agents, uniform workload: 160 against 1731 s). Three of six prespecified hypotheses were not met in every cell: H1 failed in 1 of 36 cells, H3 in 4 of 48 comparisons, all where the lease lock deadlocked, and H4 in 2 of 4 cells, losing to optimistic concurrency control at 32 and 64 agents. By design, it applies to any tool with exclusive mutations.
Author: Clisham, Allister
Institution: University of Victoria
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7224459296