Modelling and Analysis of Parallel/Distributed Time-dependent Systems: An Approach Based on JADE

The work described in this paper develops a control framework for modelling and analysis of parallel/distributed time-dependent multi-agent systems. The approach centres on a minimal computational model which separates agent behaviours from schedulable actions which model activities which have a time duration and require specific processing units. Different control strategies ranging from pure concurrent to time sensitive (real-time or simulated-time) can be considered and applied as a plug-in to a multi-agent system. The control framework is tailored to the JADE distributed agent infrastructure, which lacks of any built-in solution for developing time-dependent applications. This paper focusses on the achievement of control strategies for schedulability analysis of embedded real-time systems designed to execute on a multicore/distributed context. As a case study, a real-time tasking set is modelled and analyzed through simulation, which requires flexible computational resources.

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