EVALUATING THE COST OF SUPPORTING INTERACTION AND SIMULATION THROUGH THE ENVIRONMENT
Flavien Balbo, Fabien Badeig, Julien Saunier · 2011
The environment has emerged as a powerful first-order abstraction in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), as well as a critical building block. One benefit is to reduce the complexity of the agents by delegating to the environment a part of the tasks of the system. This delegating process provides a flexible way to exchange information and to coordinate the agents thanks to the environment. The counterpart is a centralization of a part of the MAS processes inside the environment. In this paper, we present the modeling of an environment for multi-agent communication and simulation. Our proposition enables the addition of advanced features to the MAS like multi-party communications (communication) and contextual activation (simulation). We evaluate the cost of this environment process and compare it to the execution of the same tasks in the agents for communication and simulation.