Evaluation of Conflict Resolution Methods for Agent-Based Simulations on the GPU

Graphics processing units (GPUs) have been shown to be well-suited to accelerate agent-based simulations. A fundamental challenge in agent-based simulations is the resolution of conflicts arising when agents compete for simulated resources, which may introduce substantial overhead. A variety of conflict resolution methods on the GPU have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we systematize and compare these methods and propose two simple new variants. We present performance measurements on the example of the well-known segregation model. We show that the choice of conflict resolution method can substantially affect the simulation performance. Further, although methods in which agents actively indicate their interest in a resource require the use of costly atomic operations, these methods generally outperform the alternatives.