EAGENTS: AN APPROACH FOR MODELING AND SIMULATING MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS
Nanjangud C. Narendra · Journal of the Association for Information Systems · 2003
The shift from traditional store-and-catalogue business transactions to internet-enabled e-commerce promises to change the way businesses interact with each other and with their customers in several fundamental ways.It has also been claimed that e-commerce has the potential to create an environment where companies will be at their most agile and marketplaces will approach perfect efficiency.Hence it is worthwhile to investigate how useful e-commerce would truly be.In other words, we would need to ask (and obtain answers for) questions such as: how to prevent decision-makers from being overwhelmed with too much information, how to efficiently build and manage certain kinds of e-commerce environments, etc.Many researchers are turning to architectures of collaborating agents to provide answers to these and other questions, since agents and multiagent systems seem to be highly promising technologies for e-commerce applications.However, before we build and deploy multi-agent systems on a large scale, we need to be sure that they deliver as promised, and we need to determine this at minimal cost.Hence there is a need for modeling and simulating such systems.In this paper, we first present a lifecycle-based approach to simulating multi-agent systems borrowing from ideas developed in Software Process Modeling research.We then present a reference architecture for multiagent systems called eAgents.Using the eAgent architecture as a building block, we show how large multiagent systems can be simulated, and their behavior observed and measured for different e-commerce models and situations.