Bringing Discrete Event Simulation Concepts into Multi-Agent Systems

Agent-based Modelling (ABM) is a very efficacious conceptualisation paradigm that easily allows the representation of very complex physical systems composed of autonomous, possibly intelligent, interacting entities. For this reason, Agent-based systems (ABS) have been incorporated into simulation as a mean of effectively increasing the realism through adaptation and learning abilities. The integration between ABM and simulation, namely Agent-based Modelling and Simulation (ABMS), however, can be further exploited by modelling the simulation system as a Multi Agent System (MAS). To achieve this, the first step is to provide ABSs with discrete event simulation (DES) concepts (simulation time and services) and an interaction protocol. In this paper, we present a formulation of DES in terms of MAS through the design of software framework, named SimJADE, for the ABMS.