PASSIM: a simulation-based process for the development of multi-agent systems

Abstract

This paper presents the Process for Agent Specification, Simulation and Implementation (PASSIM), a simulation-based development process for Multi-agent Systems (MASs), which was obtained by integrating the well-known and established Process for Agent Societies Specification and Implementation (PASSI) methodology and a Statecharts-based simulation methodology supporting functional and nonfunctional validation of the MAS being developed. PASSIM can be effectively used as an experimental tool in the context of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) for evaluating the benefits of using simulation for MAS development. To exemplify this process and demonstrate its effectiveness, a case study concerning the analysis, design and simulation of a complex MAS implementing an agent-based e-marketplace is defined and detailed.

Agent-Oriented Methodologies Evaluation Frameworks: A Review

“…Based on this approach, it would be possible to compare, evaluate and validate di®erent methodologies or di®erent implementations of a MAS. Some of the frameworks proposed for this purpose are PASSIM [87], developed on top of PASSI with a Statechartsbased simulation phase for functional and non-functional validation, ELDAMeth [88,89] for simulation-based rapid prototyping of MAS, and the integrated approach developed on top of Gaia [90] and other methodologies by using the method engineering paradigm for simulation-based development and validation of MAS. For example, in PASSIM [87], a simulation phase is introduced before the actual coding and development of the real-world system and after the design phase.…”

Translation of statechart agents into a BDI framework for MAS engineering

“…Further works on the exploitation of Statechart-based agents have been carried out in some AOSE methodologies, such as PASSI (Cernuzzi et al, 2005), PASSIM (Cossentino et al, 2008), INGENIAS (Pavn et al, 2008), ELDAMeth (Fortino and Russo, 2012). Apart from ELDAMeth and PASSIM methodologies that specifically adopt the ELDAModel at detailed design and implementation levels, in PASSI and INGENIAS, Statecharts are only used at the design level to specify agent behavior and protocols, but implementation is usually not based on state programming.…”

“…In this sense, agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) tools available from the literature (Fortino and Russo, 2012;Cernuzzi et al, 2005;Cossentino et al, 2008;Pavn et al, 2008;Padgham and Winikoff, 2004) provide a development process which, while quite general at the first high-level steps, in the further steps, surely has a certain dependence on the model and programming language used for the implementation of agents. As a consequence, when an agent-based project has to be started, since a choice of the programming platform/language must be performed, a specific model is consequently chosen as well: should it change (due to new system requirements), a-more or less strong-refactoring process will be needed.…”

Distributed architectures for surrogate clustering in CDNs

“…In Figure 6 the process schema related to the ELDA-based methodology (see Figure 6) is shown. In particular, the process starts with two parallel activities: -Simulation Model Definition, which provides an ELDAbased simulation model for the considered Agent-based High-level System Design produced by using specific phases of available agent-oriented design methodologies [2]. -Performance Indices Definition, which defines specific performance indices for evaluation and comparison purposes.…”

“…To evaluate the performances of the proposed architectures, the agent-based modeling and simulation approach [10,14,2], which has been successfully applied in different application domains ranging from computers and telecommunications to biological and economic systems, is used. In particular, an agentbased modeling and simulation methodology is employed [5]: the modeling phase is driven by a Statecharts-based modeling language and supported by a visual tool which automatically translates visual specifications into code; the simulation phase is based on an agent-oriented and event-driven simulation framework which executes the code produced in the modeling phase in the context of purposely set distributed scenarios.…”