A CONTEXTUAL ENVIRONMENT APPROACH FOR MULTI-AGENT-BASED SIMULATION

Fabien Badeig, Flavien Balbo, Suzanne Pinson

2010

Abstract

Multi-agent-based simulation (MABS) is used to understand complex real life processes and to experiment several scenarios in order to reproduce, understand and evaluate these processes. A crucial point in the design of a multi-agent-based simulation is the choice of a scheduling policy. In classical multi-agent-based simulation frameworks, a pitfall is the fact that the action phase, based on local agent context analysis, is repeated in each agent at each time cycle during the simulation execution. This analysis inside the agents reduces agent flexibility and genericity and limits agent behavior reuse in various simulations. If the designer wants to modify the way the agent reacts to the context, he could not do it without altering the way the agent is implemented because the link between agent context and agent actions is an internal part of the agent. In contrast to classical approaches, our proposition, called EASS (Environment as Active Support for Simulation), is a new multi-agent-based simulation framework, where the context is analyzed by the environment and where agent activation is based on context evaluation. This activation process is what we call contextual activation. The main advantage of contextual activation is the improvement of complex agent simulation design in terms of flexibility, genericity and agent behavior reuse.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Badeig F., Balbo F. and Pinson S. (2010). A CONTEXTUAL ENVIRONMENT APPROACH FOR MULTI-AGENT-BASED SIMULATION . In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART, ISBN 978-989-674-022-1, pages 212-217. DOI: 10.5220/0002733302120217

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart10,
author={Fabien Badeig and Flavien Balbo and Suzanne Pinson},
title={A CONTEXTUAL ENVIRONMENT APPROACH FOR MULTI-AGENT-BASED SIMULATION},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART,},
year={2010},
pages={212-217},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0002733302120217},
isbn={978-989-674-022-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART,
TI - A CONTEXTUAL ENVIRONMENT APPROACH FOR MULTI-AGENT-BASED SIMULATION
SN - 978-989-674-022-1
AU - Badeig F.
AU - Balbo F.
AU - Pinson S.
PY - 2010
SP - 212
EP - 217
DO - 10.5220/0002733302120217