Evaluation of a selective distributed discovery strategy in a fully decentralized biologically inspired environment

The increased demand and complexity of services operating within open distributed environments has emphasized the need for systems that are adaptive, self-organizing and more robust. In order to address these issues some agent oriented approaches have adopted ideas from natural systems as possible solutions. The introduction of biological properties, especially birth and death of agents as expected events, generates an extremely dynamic environment where it is difficult to maintain the overall connectivity of the overlay network and facilitate efficient discovery processes. In this paper we evaluate the performance of a selective discovery mechanism in a distributed bio-inspired multi-agent community through a simulation study. The primary focus of the study is on the impacts which death and (sexual/asexual) reproduction events have on the effectiveness of the discovery process in different overlay networks.