An Agent Infrastructure for Distributed Simulation of HLA and a Case Study using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper proposes an agent infrastructure (Theatre) centered on Java for distributed simulations over HLA/RTI. The architecture rests on actors (agents) as the basic building blocks. Actors have a public message interface and encapsulate a state of local variables and a behavior patterned as a finite state machine. Actors interact to one another by asynchronous message passing. At the system level, theatres are used as the execution platforms for actors. Theatres naturally map on to HLA federates. Actors can migrate between theatres for configuration or load-balancing concerns. The paper introduces Theatre and shows its application to a complex simulation model based on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The case study is an open agent-based distributed model where mobile agents follow communication patterns established at runtime.