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Evaluating Different Concurrency Configurations for Executing Multi-Agent Systems

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Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9318))

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Abstract

Reactiveness and performance are important features of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and the underlying concurrency model can have a direct impact on them. In multicore programming it is interesting to exploit all the computer cores in order to improve these desirable features. In this paper we perform an experiment to evaluate different concurrency configurations that can be adopted to run an MAS and analyse the effect caused by each configuration on variables like deliberation time and response time. As a result, we identify the advantages and disadvantages for each configuration allowing thus an MAS developer to choose a suitable configuration depending upon the priorities of the application.

The authors are grateful for the support given by CNPq, grants 140261/2013-3, 448462/2014-1, and 306301/2012-1.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Internal concurrency means that agents can perform several activities concurrently (e.g. execute more than one intention at the same time).

  2. 2.

    The term deed is used in the same form as in [15] and it refers to several kinds of formulae that can appear in a plan body.

  3. 3.

    The prototype, experiment, and results are provided at https://sourceforge.net/p/mrzatelli/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/2015/Experiment2/.

  4. 4.

    This exponential growth is an expected behavior for the configurations used in this experiment because the computation of Fibonacci numbers, implemented following the traditional recursive approach, has an exponential complexity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Florianópolis, Brazil

    Maicon R. Zatelli & Jomi F. Hübner

  2. University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Alessandro Ricci

Authors
  1. Maicon R. Zatelli
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  2. Alessandro Ricci
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  3. Jomi F. Hübner
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Correspondence to Maicon R. Zatelli .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Torino, Italy

    Matteo Baldoni

  2. DEIB - Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy

    Luciano Baresi

  3. Dept. of Information& Computing Sciences, Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Mehdi Dastani

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Zatelli, M.R., Ricci, A., Hübner, J.F. (2015). Evaluating Different Concurrency Configurations for Executing Multi-Agent Systems. In: Baldoni, M., Baresi, L., Dastani, M. (eds) Engineering Multi-Agent Systems. EMAS 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9318. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26184-3_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26184-3_12

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