Efficient environment management for distributed simulation of large-scale situated multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems have been proven very effective for the modelling and simulation (M&S) of complexsystems like those related to biology, engineering, social sciences and so forth. The intrinsic spatialcharacter of many such systems leads to the definition of situated agent. A situated agent owns spatialcoordinates and acts and interacts with its peers in a hosting territory. In the context of parallel/distributedsimulation of situated agent models, the territory represents a huge shared variable that requires a carefulhandling. Frequent access by agents to territory information easily becomes a bottleneck degradingsystem performance and scalability. This paper proposes an original approach to modelling and distributedsimulation of large-scale situated multi-agent systems. Time management is exploited for resolving conflictsand achieving data consistency while accessing the environment. The approach allows a simplification ofthe M&S tasks by making the modeller unaware of distribution concerns while ensuring the achievementof good scalability and performance during the distributed simulation. Practical aspects of the approach aredemonstrated through some modelling examples based on Tileworld. Copyright⃝c 2010 JohnWiley & Sons,Ltd.