A MultiAgent Environment for MPSEs*

In tllis paper we present a paradigm for simulaling complex phenomena which may involve multiple physical pllcnomena and complicated geometry. The computational structure is of cooperating agents and much of the proposed methodology is widely applicable, but the focus in tItis paper is on phenomena modeled by partial differential equations (PDE). The computational process is 10 subdivide the physical object into components of simple geometric shapes modeled by a single problem solving environment (PSE). PSEs are viewed as agents which solve the PDE on each component independently. The interfaces between the components mustlLavc physical interface conditions satisfied; mediator agents use rela.xation techniques for this. An agent-based architecture of an environment for building systems to implement this paradigm is described, using PSEs which are encapsulated into solver agents. This approaclL is naturally parallel and highly scalable; it is suitable for a wide variety of parallel and distributed high performance computing (HPC) architectures; it allows for the reuse and cvoltltion of existing HPC software, and for a convenient abstraction of the solution process for non-expert users. An implementation of tIl