Tuning Java to Run Interactive Multiagent Simulations over Jason

Java-based simulation environments are currently used by many multiagent systems (MAS), since they mainly provide portability as well as an interesting reduction of the development cost. However, this kind of MAS are rarely considered when developing interactive applications with time response constraints. This paper analyses the performance provided by Jason, a well-known Java-based MAS platform, as a suitable framework for developing interactive multiagent simulations. We show how to tune both the heap size and the garbage collection of the Java Virtual Machine in order to achieve a good performance while executing a simple locomotion benchmark based on crowd simulations. Furthermore, the paper includes an evaluation of Jason’s performance over multi-core processors. The main conclusion derived from this work is that, by means of Java tuning, it is possible to run interactive MAS programmed using Jason.

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