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Toward a Temporal Environment for Multi-Agent Simulation

Tahina Ralitera, Denis Payet, and Rémy Courdier
Laboratoire d’Informatique et de Mathématiques (LIM), Université de La Réunion, 97490 La Réunion, France

Abstract— The environment plays an important role in multi-agent systems (MASs). Especially in situated MASs, it is used as a shared memory for agents and as a medium for indirect coordination. There are different types of environment, with different metric and containing different types of information. The more choices for environment structures, the broader its application in the field of MASs. The information space has different dimensions, and the temporal dimension is an important one. Especially in a situated MASs, the agents can be situated in space and time. However, in MASs, this temporal dimension is often neglected or plays a subordinate role. This paper shares the idea of exploiting the potential of this long-neglected temporal dimension by introducing the notion of temporal environment. This consists of using the time axis not only for the simulation scheduling, but as an environment where the agents could interact. The temporal environment presented in this paper is based on a particular time scheduling approach called the Temporality Model and on the influence/reaction principle.


Index Terms—Multi-agent simulation, environment, time axis, scheduler, temporal environment, temporality model, infuence/reaction

Cite: Tahina Ralitera, Denis Payet, and Rémy Courdier, "Toward a Temporal Environment for Multi-Agent Simulation," Journal of Communications, vol. 14, no. 7, pp. 607-613, 2019. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.14.7.607-613