Adaptivity in Distributed Agent-Based Simulation: A Generic Load-Balancing Approach

Distributed agent-based simulations often suffer from an imbalance in computational load, leading to a suboptimal use of resources. This happens when part of the computational resoures are waiting idle for another process to finish. Self-adaptive load-balancing algorithms have been developed to use these resources more optimally. These algorithms are typically implemented ad-hoc, making re-usability and maintenance difficult. In this work, we present a generic self-adaptive framework. This methodology is evaluated with the Acsim framework on two simulations: a micro-traffic simulation and a cellular automata simulation. For each of these scenarios a scalable and adaptive load-balancing algorithm is implemented, showing significant improvements in execution time of the simulation.