DISTRIBUTED AGENT BASED SIMULATION FRAMEWORK

Abstract

Industrial companies are faced today with strong competition and fast changing markets. To reduce the risk and evaluate alternatives, simulation is often considered to be an adequate tool. Industrial companies' simulation models must have enough internal detail to be useful but, at the same time, must take into account the external environmental behaviour. Distributed simulation has specific characteristics to allow the integration of these models but its complexity limits its use in industry as stated in the literature. To overcome these difficulties, a framework is proposed, using Agent-based Modelling and Simulation (ABMS) technique and offering communication and synchronization mechanisms, which allow the integration of simulation models in the industrial area. To promote semantic interoperability, a business language is also proposed based on the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL). To validate the framework a prototype was developed. The experiments made with the prototype shows that a distributed simulation can be more efficient than a single computer simulation as the number of agents increases in the model.