Agent-Based Modeling, Large-Scale Simulations
Hazel Ruth Parry · 2009
Agent: A popular definition of an agent, particularly in AI research, is that of Wooldridge (Wooldridge 1999 ), pp. 29: “an agent is a computer system that is situated in some environment, and that is capable of autonomous action in this environment in order to meet its design objectives”. In particular, it is the autonomy, flexibility, inter-agent communication, reactivity and proactive-ness of the agents that distinguishes the paradigm and gives power to agent-based models and multi-agent simulation (Heppenstall 2004 ; Jennings 2000 ). Multi-agent systems (MAS) comprise of numerous agents, which are given rules by which they act and interact with one another to achieve a set of goals. Block Mapping: A method of partitioning an array of elements between nodes of a distributed system, where the array elements are partitioned as evenly as possible into blocks of consecutive elements and assigned to processors. The size of the blocks approximates to the number of array elements...