Efficient environment management for distributed simulation of large‐scale situated multi‐agent systems

Abstract

SummaryMulti‐agent systems have been proven very effective for the modelling and simulation (M&S) of complex systems like those related to biology, engineering, social sciences and so forth. The intrinsic spatial character of many such systems leads to the definition of a situated agent. A situated agent owns spatial coordinates and acts and interacts with its peers in a hosting territory. In the context of parallel/distributed simulation of situated agent models, the territory represents a huge shared variable that requires careful handling. Frequent access by agents to territory information easily becomes a bottleneck degrading system performance and scalability. This paper proposes an original approach to modelling and distributed simulation of large‐scale situated multi‐agent systems. Time management is exploited for resolving conflicts and achieving data consistency while accessing the environment. The approach allows a simplification of the M&S tasks by making the modeller unaware of distribution concerns while ensuring the achievement of good scalability and performance during the distributed simulation. Practical aspects of the approach are demonstrated through some modelling examples based on Tileworld. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Intelligent Educational Assistant based on Multiagent System and Context-Aware Computing

“…A rule based on proximity of next available agenda is applied on local Agent as conflict resolution strategy [27], without Kernel synchronization to this task needed. In this operation, adapted to this experiment, a pre-reservation of resource occurs after Kernel recommendation and remains valid waiting to user's confirmation on the proposed agenda during a defined time by context.…”

A Control Framework for Model Continuity in JADE

“…Actors [12][13][14] hide internal data variables and have a behaviour (finite state automaton) for responding to messages. The communication model consists of asynchronous message passing.…”

“…The proposed control framework purposely depends on a minimal computational actor model [12][13][14] which simplifies the use of JADE behavioural structure. The actor model actually used in this paper is novel in that it owns a notion of actions which are a key for transparently switching from simulation to real execution, and naturally map on the available processing units managed by a control strategy.…”

An approach for scalable parallel execution of ant algorithms

“…The developer of ant-based algorithms remains in charge only of defining the behavior of the agents modeling the ants, without coping with issues related to parallel/distributed programming and performance optimization. Differently from [12], where the purposely developed logical time notion was used in the context of eventdriven distributed simulation, here the approach is exploited and evaluated for the distributed execution of step-based ant algorithms.…”

“…There are some papers that focus on the same issue [8] [9] [10] [11], but they do not explicitly manage the problem of territory representation and handling. Our approach relies on explicit territory management [12] [13] [14] and a special-purpose notion of logical time [12] [15]. Data consistency and conflict management are transparently handled without resorting to lock-based mechanisms and highlevel synchronization primitives.…”