An efficient and light-weight multi-tasking model to achieve intra-agent concurrency for SAGE

Multi-agent systems implicate a high degree of concurrency at both the inter- and intra-agent levels. Scalable, fault tolerant, agent grooming environment (SAGE), the second generation FlPA compliant MAS requires a built in mechanism to achieve both the inter- and intra-agent concurrency. This paper dilates upon an attempt to provide a reliable, efficient and light-weight solution to provide intra-agent concurrency within the internal agent architecture of SAGE. It addresses the issues related to using the JAVA threading model to provide this level of concurrency to the agent and provides an alternative approach that is based on an event-driven, concurrent and user-scalable multi-tasking model for the agent´s internal model. The findings of this paper show that our proposed approach is suitable for providing an efficient and lightweight concurrent task model for SAGE and considerably outweighs the performance of multithreaded tasking model based on JAVA in terms of throughput and efficiency. This has been illustrated using the practical implementation and evaluation of both models.