SPADES - a distributed agent simulation environment with software-in-the-loop execution

Abstract

Simulations 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 Sofnvare-in-theb o p 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.

HLogo: A Parallel Haskell Variant of NetLogo

“…The key problem as they state is the decomposition of the environment which leads to the problem of fair load balancing of the distributed machines. (Riley and Riley, 2003) propose another Distributed Agent Simulation Environment called SPADES. SPADES tries to address the concerns of Artificial Intelligence when designing agent systems, while having distributed execution and reproducibility of results.…”

“…This success of ABM sprang off numerous frameworks to alleviate the development of agent-based models (Tobias and Hofmann, 2004;Railsback et al, 2006;Castle and Crooks, 2006). While research has been focused on the methodology (Salamon, 2011), ease of use (Wilkerson-Jerde and Wilensky, 2010), portability (Grimm et al, 2006) and expressiveness (Sakellariou et al, 2008) of agent-based models, little has been done in improving the performance of available ABM frameworks (Riley and Riley, 2003).…”

A Lookahead Behavior Model for Multi-Agent Hybrid Simulation

“…Current simulation time is 1 t . The MovingAgent is fetching the first action of move a from its action list, as it is going to arrive at point B linearly at constant speed at 2 t .…”

“…Through the agents and interactions among them, it generates system changes and, therefore, forms a bottom-up perspective for people to simulate and research the emergent behavior of the system, where the nature of the system can be understood much better. The behavior model of a typical agent can be built using a generic "sense-think-act" paradigm [1][2][3][4] in multi-agent simulation (MAS). The steps in this paradigm include the agent's process of perceiving the environment, making decisions, and acting, which correspond to the sense-think-act cycle, respectively.…”

Three Humanoid Soccer Platforms: Comparison and Synthesis

“…Earlier the platform used the SPADES timer [21], and it still uses the SPARK simulation engine [17]: both of these were developed by the RoboCup community. The simulation server code is fully open source.…”