Distributed Simulation of RePast Models over HLA/Actors

This paper reports about a research project -HLA-ACTOR-REPAST- aimed to distributing RePast models thus potentially corresponding to the computational demands of large and reconfigurable multi-agent systems (MASs). Novel in HLA-ACTOR-REPAST is an exploitation of a lean actor infrastructure implemented in Java. Actors bring to RePast agents such features as migration, location-transparent naming, efficient communications, and a control-centric framework. Actors can be orchestrated by an in-the-large custom control structure which can ensure the necessary message causality constraints. Distribution and time management concerns depend on the IEEE standard HLA middleware. The paper first discusses details of the software engineering process underlying HLA-ACTOR-REPAST. The mapping techniques, based on Java text annotations and aspect oriented programming, minimize "code intrusions" in the original model. Then the paper describes some experiments and performance results of applying HLA-ACTOR-REPAST to a distributed version of a RePast Tileworld model.