The Distributed Simulation of AgentBased Systems

Agent-based systems are increasingly being applied in a wide range of areas including telecommunications, business pro-cess modelling, computer games, control of mobile robots and military simulations. Such systems are typically extremely complex and it is often useful to be able to simulate an agent-based system to learn more about its behaviour or investigate the implications of alternative architectures. However conven-tional distributed simulation techniques cannot easily be ap-plied to the problem of modelling the interaction of a system of autonomous components. In this paper, we propose a gen-eral framework for the distributed simulation of agent-based systems and sketch an algorithm for the efficient distribution of agents and their environment across multiple processors