Simulation management for agent-based distributed systems

Abstract

The development of open distributed applications with autonomous components is increasingly challenged by rising complexity caused, e.g., by heterogeneous software and hardware modules as well as varying interactions between such components. For such systems, simulation provides a well-established way to study the effects of different system configurations on its behavior as, e.g., especially its performance. Therefore, simulation is of particular interest for autonomous distributed applications, i.e. for those that exhibit emergent phenomena and where simulation is required for, e.g., validation purposes within the development process. Prominent application domains targeted at in this work include the areas of multi-agent and self-organizing systems. For easing and speeding up simulations of system characteristics when developing such systems, this work presents tools and a powerful software framework for automating the corresponding simulation management. Its basis is a declarative language that is used to describe the setting to be simulated as well as its evaluation. Then, an additional software framework is provided that processes this description automatically - thereby relieving the developer from manually managing the execution, observation, optimization and evaluation of the simulation. In summary, this leads to much easier and sounder system simulations and, thus, to developing better autonomous distributed systems and applications. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.