SPADES - A Distributed Agent Simulation Environment With Software-in-the-Loop Execution

©2003 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or distribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.Presented at the Winter Simulation Conference, 2003Simulations are used extensively for studying artificial intelligence. However, the simulation technology in use by and designed for the artificial intelligence community often fails to take advantage of much of the work by the larger simulation community to produce distributed, repeatable, and efficient simulations. We present the new system known as System for Parallel Agent Discrete Event Simulator, (SPADES), which is a simulation environment for the artificial intelligence community. SPADES focuses on the agent as a fundamental simulation component. The thinking rime of an agent is tracked and reflected in the results of the agents’ actions by using a Software-in-the-Loop mechanism. SPADES supports distributed execution of the agents across multiple systems, while at the same time producing repeatable results regardless of network or system load. We discuss the design of SPADES in detail and give experimental results. SPADES is flexible enough for a variety of application domains in the artificial intelligence research community