MISIA: Middleware Infrastructure to Simulate Intelligent Agents

Abstract

Nowadays there is a clear trend towards using methods and tools that can help to develop multiagent systems (MAS). This study presents a multiagent based middleware for the agents behavior simulation. The main challenge of this work is the design and development of a new infrastructure that can act as a middleware to communicate the current technology in charge of the development of the multiagent system and the technology in charge of the simulation, visualization and analysis of the behavior of the agents. It is a key element when considering that MAS are autonomous, adaptive and complex systems and provides advances abilities for visualization. The proposed middleware infrastructure makes it possible to visualize the emergent agent behaviour and the entity agent. It also allows visualization of the interaction between the agent and the environment.

From Simulation to Development in MAS - A JADE-based Approach

“…As Table 1 illustrates, JADE agents execute in separate threads and while this architecture facilitates the platform's distribution, JADE agents are heavy in terms of resources. Experiments with JADE show that the platform's scalability is limited in number of agents and that the global system performance drops quickly for large numbers of agents (Mengistu et al, 2008) (García et al, 2011). This further strengthens the idea that using JADE or a JADE-Repast hybrid, as described in Section 2, is not the best course of action if performance is an important issue.…”

“…It was de- (García et al, 2011) MISIA's approach, as suggested by Figure 1, is to use a middle layer that acts as the bridge between two other layers that interact with JADE and Repast. By extending the agents in Repast and JADE, communicating through a coordinator and synchronizing their state, these agents work as a single one.…”

“…Some works (García et al, 2011;Gormer et al, 2011) propose, as a solution for bridging the gap between MAS development and simulation, an integration of JADE and simulation features by extending this framework with a simulation layer created from scratch, or by integrating another framework, such as Repast.…”

SAJaS: Enabling JADE-Based Simulations

“…MISIA [10] is a middleware whose goal is to enhance the simulation of intelligent agents and to allow the visualization and analysis of agent's behaviour. It is no longer an active project, having evolved into other more specific tools.…”

“…This is an important distinction as compared to other works, such as [10]. Given its reliance on the underlying simulation framework, however, it should not be too difficult to implement a more robust synchronization approach, by upgrading the sajas.core.Agent class with appropriate data members and methods.…”