The Distributed Simulation of Multi-agent Systems

Agent-based systems are increasingly being applied in a wide range of areas including telecommunications, business process modeling, computer games, control of mobile robots, and military simulations. Such systems are typically extremely complex and it is often useful to be able to simulate on agent-based system to learn more about its behaviour or investigate the implications of alternative architectures. In this paper, we discuss the application of distributed discrete-event simulation techniques to the simulation of multiagent systems. We identify the efficient distribution of the agents' environment as a key problem in the simulation of agent-based systems and present an approach to the decomposition of the environment that facilitates load balancing.