Towards a conceptual framework to support adaptative agent-based systems partitioning

Scalability is a key issue for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) that aim to model and simulate complex systems. Distributed infrastructures such as clusters, grids and clouds are powerful computational environments that can be effectively used to run large-scale agent-based simulations. To properly distribute an agent-based system and ensure its performance, an appropriate partitioning approach is required. Although multiple partition methods for distributed MAS exist, they remain specific to the individual requirements of a given application domain. There is no generic approach for guiding the designers and developers to select an appropriate approach for partitioning a given agent-based system. Thus a recurrent challenging task, for MAS designers and developers, is how to evaluate, select and then apply the appropriate partitioning mechanism for a given MAS. Therefore, in this paper, we present a generic conceptual framework useful to analyze existing partitioning methods. It can also be used as a basis while designing a distributed architecture of new MAS.