Agents in discrete event simulation

Test beds for multi-agent systems provide the means for experimenting with multiple agents that act and interact concurrently in their environment. Mostly, test beds constitute specialized tools which provide speci c scenarios for testing speci c agentarchitectures. To facilitate reuse and a exible compositional construction of experimental frames for multiagent systems, JAMES, a Java Based Agent Modeling Environment for Simulation, explores the integration of agents within a general modeling and simulation formalism for discrete event systems. Therefore, a compositional and hierarchical model design which supports variable structure models is complemented with a distributed, concurrent execution. Two experiments with planning agents illustrate our approach.