How Fast Can a BDI Agent Respond?

Abstract

It is very important to know how fast a BDI agent can react to and process incoming event sequences if we want to apply such autonomous agents into time-sensitive applications like the Close-In weapon system in air-carriers. In [15], we proposed an analysis method for traditional sequential agents. In this paper we extend the theoretical analysis method to parallel BDI agents. Our method can estimate the average response time using the average attributes of a sequence of events based on probability and queueing theory. The simulation experiments show that our theoretical analysis method is effective. We also show by an experiment that an agent that dynamically allocates its computational time resources perform better than one that does not. Thus, the theoretical method suggests a way to quickly estimate the performance of an agent if the average attributes of the incoming event sequence are known in advance. Such an analysis of average response time can definitely benefit constructing more efficient BDI agents that situate in time-sensitive environments.