The paper presents a load management mechanism for distributed simulations of multi-agent systems.

The development of many complex simulation applications requires collaborative effort from researchers with different domain knowledge and expertise, possibly at different locations. These simulation systems often require huge computing resources and data sets, which may be geographically distributed. In order to support collaborative model development and to cater for the increasing complexity of such systems, it is necessary to harness distributed resources over the Internet. The emergence of Grid technologies provide exciting new opportunities for large scale distributed simulation, enabling collaboration and the use of distributed computing resources, while also facilitating access to geographically distributed data sets. This paper discusses the research challenges that must be addressed before these opportunities can be exploited and presents HLA GRID REPAST, a system for executing large scale distributed simulations of agent based systems over the Grid.

Abstract