Communication- and computation- bounded agents in multi-agent simulations

Abstract

This paper proposes a mechanism for simulating limited communication bandwidth and processing power available to an agent in multi-agent simulations. Although there exist dedicated tools able to simulate computer networks, most multi-agent platforms lack support for this kind of resource allocation. We target such multi-agent platforms and offer an easy method to implement the missing functionality by the agent designer. The introduced method assigns two additional message buffers to each agent, which are used to (i) limit the number of messages an agent is able to send in one simulation round, and (ii) limit the number of messages an agent is able to process in one simulation round. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.