A FRAMEWORK FOR THE DISTRIBUTED SIMULATION OF AGENT-BASED SYSTEMS

Agent-based systems are increasingly being applied in a wide range of areas including telecommunications, business process modelling, computer games, control of mobile robots and military simulations. Such systems are typically extremely complex and it is often useful to be able to simulate an agentbased system to learn more about its behaviour or investigate the implications of alternative architectures. However conventional distributed simulation techniques cannot easily be applied to the problem of modelling the interaction of a system of autonomous components. In this paper, we propose a general framework for the distributed simulation of agent-based systems and sketch an algorithm for the efficient distribution of agents and their environment across multiple processors.

[1]  LamportLeslie.  Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system , 1978 .

[2]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Intelligent agents: theory and practice , 1995, The Knowledge Engineering Review.

[3]  Jeffrey M. Bradshaw,et al.  Software agents , 1997 .

[4]  Arthur C. Graesser,et al.  Is it an Agent, or Just a Program?: A Taxonomy for Autonomous Agents , 1996, ATAL.

[5]  Michael Wooldridge,et al.  Applications of intelligent agents , 1998 .

[6]  David Jefferson,et al.  Fast Concurrent Simulation Using the Time Warp Mechanism. Part I. Local Control. , 1982 .

[7]  Adelinde M. Uhrmacher,et al.  Modeling and simulation of mobile agents , 2000, Future Gener. Comput. Syst..

[8]  Jayadev Misra,et al.  Distributed discrete-event simulation , 1986, CSUR.

[9]  Horst Mehl,et al.  Shared variables in distributed simulation , 1993, PADS '93.

[10]  R. M. Fujimoto,et al.  Parallel discrete event simulation , 1989, WSC '89.

[11]  K. Mani Chandy,et al.  Asynchronous distributed simulation via a sequence of parallel computations , 1981, CACM.

[12]  Satish K. Tripathi,et al.  Parallel and distributed simulation of discrete event systems , 1994 .

[13]  Richard M. Fujimoto,et al.  Parallel Discrete Event Simulation Using Space-Time Memory , 1991, ICPP.

[14]  Bryan Horling,et al.  Survivability Simulator for Multi-Agent Adaptive Coordination , 1998 .

[15]  Petra Tyschler,et al.  MODELING MOBILE AGENTS , 1998 .

[16]  Aaron Sloman,et al.  What's an AI Toolkit For? , 1998 .