AgentScope: multi-agent systems development in focus

Multi-agent systems form the basis of many innovative large-scale distributed applications. The development of such applications requires a careful balance of a wide range of concerns: a detailed understanding of the behaviour of the abstract algorithms being employed, a knowledge of the effects and costs of operating in a distributed environment, and an expertise in the performance requirements of the application itself. Experimental work plays a key role in the process of designing such systems. This paper examines the multi-agent systems development cycle from a distributed systems perspective. A survey of recent experimental studies finds that a large proportion of work on the design of multi-agent systems is focused on the analytical and simulation phases of development. This paper advocates an alternative more comprehensive development cycle, which extends from theoretical studies to simulations, emulations, demonstrators and finally staged deployment. AgentScope, a tool that supports the experimental stages of multi-agents systems development and facilitates long-term dispersed research efforts, is introduced. AgentScope consists of a small set of interfaces on which experimental work can be built independently of a particular type of platform. The aim is to make not only agent code but also experimental scenarios, and metrics reusable, both between projects and over simulation, emulation and demonstration platforms. An example gossip-based sampling experiment demonstrates reusability, showing the ease with which an experiment can be defined, modified into a comparison study, and ported between a simulator and an actual agent-operating system.