Three New Design Patterns for Scalable Agent-Based Computing and Simulation

Multi-agent approach is very popular for modelling and simulation of complex phenomena, design and programming of decentralised computing systems. Asynchronous beings, which do not share state but communicate using messages are a convenient abstraction for representing various phenomena observed in the real world. When the number of the considered agents grows, the designers and developers of such systems must address the problem of performance. Introducing distribution is often a weapon of choice, which, however, does not guarantee obtaining proper scalability and efficiency. The intensity of communication in a large-scale agent-based system can easily exceed the abilities of a distributed hardware architecture, leading to poor performance. After analysing various distributed agent-based systems, we identified several reasons for limited performance and several architectural solutions, which can help overcoming this problem. The main aim of the presented work is identification and systematization of these architectural solutions in the form of design patterns. As a result, we propose three new design patterns for building scalable distributed agent-based systems. A systematic description of their aims, structure, variants and features is provided, together with examples of applications. PDF  XML