Abstract
Time management is essential when simulating multi-agent systems (MASs) as it allows consistent and repeatable simulation runs. So far, time management lacks support to express the timing requirements of a simulation explicitly and at an abstraction level appropriate for MAS developers. Moreover, integrating time management into a MAS requires the developer to alter the design of the MAS. In this paper, we first propose semantic duration models to capture timing requirements that reflect the semantics of MAS activities in an explicit model. Second, we present a time management infrastructure that starts from a semantic duration model description to integrate all time management functionality into a MAS transparently, i.e. without requiring the developer to alter the design of the MAS. We use aspect-oriented programming technology as it allows separation of concerns, a crucial software engineering requirement. As a case, we apply our approach to the Packet-World.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Marietto, M.B., David, N., Sichman, J.S., Coelho, H.: Requirements analysis of agent-based simulation platforms: State of the art and new prospects. In: Sichman, J.S., Bousquet, F., Davidsson, P. (eds.) MABS 2002. LNCS, vol. 2581, pp. 125–141. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Fujimoto, R.: Time management in the high level architecture. Simulation, Special Issue on High Level Architecture 71, 388–400 (1998)
Chandy, K.M., Misra, J.: Asynchronous distributed simulation via a sequence of parallel computations. Communications of the ACM 24, 198–205 (1981)
Jefferson, D., Sowizral, H.: Fast concurrent simulation using the time warp mechanism. In: Proceedings of the SCS Multiconference on Distributed simulation, pp. 63–69 (1985)
Helleboogh, A., Holvoet, T., Weyns, D.: Towards time management adaptability in multi-agent systems. In: Kudenko, D., Alonso, E., Kazakov, D. (eds.) Proceedings of the AISB 2004 Fourth Symposium on Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, pp. 20–30 (2004)
Axtell, R.: Effects of interaction topology and activation regime in several multi-agent systems. In: MABS, pp. 33–48 (2000)
Page, S.: On incentives and updating in agent based models. Journal of Computational Economics 10, 67–87 (1997)
Cornforth, D., Green, D.G., Newth, D., Kirley, M.: Do artificial ants march in step? Ordered asynchronous processes and modularity in biological systems. In: Proceedings of the eighth international conference on Artificial life, pp. 28–32. MIT Press, Cambridge (2003)
Uhrmacher, A., Kullick, B.: Plug and test software agents in virtual environments. In: Winter Simulation Conference - WSC 2000 (2000)
Himmelspach, J., Rhl, M., Uhrmacher, A.: Simulation for testing software agents - an exploration based on JAMES. In: Proc. of the 2003 Winter Simulation Conference, New Orleans, USA (2003)
Anderson, S.D., Cohen, P.R.: Timed Common Lisp: the duration of deliberation. SIGART Bull. 7, 11–15 (1996)
Anderson, S.D.: Simulation of multiple time-pressured agents. In: Winter Simulation Conference, pp. 397–404 (1997)
Riley, P., Riley, G.: SPADES — a distributed agent simulation environment with software-in-the-loop execution. In: Chick, S., Sánchez, P.J., Ferrin, D., Morrice, D.J. (eds.) Winter Simulation Conference Proceedings, vol. 1, pp. 817–825 (2003)
Kiczales, G., Lamping, J., Menhdhekar, A., Maeda, C., Lopes, C., Loingtier, J.M., Irwin, J.: Aspect-oriented programming. In: Akşit, M., Matsuoka, S. (eds.) ECOOP 1997, vol. 1241, pp. 220–242. Springer, Heidelberg (1997)
Kiczales, G., Hilsdale, E., Hugunin, J., Kersten, M., Palm, J., Griswold, W.: Getting started with AspectJ. Commun. ACM 44, 59–65 (2001)
Weyns, D., Holvoet, T.: The Packet-World as a case to study sociality in multi-agent systems. In: Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, AAMAS 2002, Bologna, Italy (2002)
Sauter, J.A., Matthews, R., Parunak, H.V.D.: Evolving adaptive pheromone path planning mechanisms. In: The First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Helleboogh, A., Holvoet, T., Weyns, D., Berbers, Y. (2005). Extending Time Management Support for Multi-agent Systems. In: Davidsson, P., Logan, B., Takadama, K. (eds) Multi-Agent and Multi-Agent-Based Simulation. MABS 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3415. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-32243-6_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-32243-6_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-25262-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32243-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)