Interest management in agent-based distributed simulations

Distributed simulation enables participants situated in different geographical locations to share a common virtual world, which is called a distributed virtual environment (DVE). Among the different research topics concerned with DVE, there is a current trend of linking multi-agent systems and DVE together. With the properties of autonomy, social ability, reactivity and proactiveness, agents can be used to represent entities in DVE, where fast and accurate decision making is a determining factor of the whole environment. This paper provides a description of integrating agents into an HLA-based distributed simulation. It focuses on how to construct the sensor of an agent with different interest management schemes. Using the JADE (Java agent development framework) agent toolkit and the high level architecture (HLA) in our prototype, a minesweeping game, we outline two different implementations of this game. Due to the dynamic characteristics of agents, a problem of overdue information from the environment is discussed, and we propose an enlarged subscription region method to solve this problem. Moreover, advisories provided by the HLA are adopted to reduce the overheads. Conclusions are drawn based on the experimental results of these implementations.