Performance comparison of data exchange in agent-based collaborative design process

Multi-agent systems have been proposed to support the distributed environment of collaborative design for many years. This research proposed two different communication architectures based on two major distributed object models, Java RMI and CORBA/Java. These two architectures could be applied in any agent systems supporting Java technology. Experiments were designed and conducted to measure the performance of data exchange between two heterogeneous agent systems with these two architectures. In the experiments, distributed object model, number of clients, data size and buffer size were defined as independent variables. Communication time was defined as dependent variable. Based on the experimental result, all independent variables are significant, and the performance of RMI is better in transferring files. Therefore, the communication architecture based on RMI is recommended for file exchange between JADE and AgentBuilder systems in practical applications.