Scalability & Multi-Agent Systems
Ralph Deters · 2001
The multi-agent research community is currently faced with a paradox. While promoting the use of agents as the silver bullet for various software engineering problems, it faces difficulties in presenting successful deployments. Despite the countless multiagent prototypes that have been developed, the number of actually deployed and in use MAS is at best very small [11]. And as long as multi-agent frameworks continue to encounter difficulties in scaling up, it seems unlikely that this will change. This paper has two aims. First, it is an attempt to relate the scalability problem of multi-agent systems with that of executing large numbers of concurrent threads. Second, it presents a CORBA/Java middle-ware layer that enables transparent access to the resources of different physical machines. Using this layer is becomes possible to build multi-agent systems that require large numbers of concurrent threads and significant memory resources.