A Framework for the Distributed Simulation of Agent-based Systems

Agent-based systems are increasingly being applied in a wide range of areas including telecommunications, business process modelling, 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 an agentbased system to learn more about its behaviour or investigate the implications of alternative architectures. However conventional distributed simulation techniques cannot easily be applied to the problem of modelling the interaction of a system of autonomous components. In this paper, we propose a general framework for the distributed simulation of agent-based systems and sketch an algorithm for the efficient distribution of agents and their environment across multiple processors.