A Multi-threaded Approach to Simulated Soccer Agents for the RoboCup Competition

To meet the timing requirements set by the RoboCup soccer server simulator, this paper proposes a multi-threaded approach to simulated soccer agents for the RoboCup competition. At its higher level each agent works at three distinct phases: sensing, thinking and acting. Instead of the traditional single threaded approaches, POSIX threads have been used here to break down these phases and implement them concurrently. The details of how this parallel implementation can significantly improve the agent's responsiveness and its overall performance are described. Implementation results show that a multithreaded approach clearly outperforms a single-threaded one in terms of efficiency, responsiveness and scalability. The proposed approach will be very efficient in multi-processor systems.