Facilitating cellular-automata-based computational space for parallel multiagent simulations

The multiagent simulation is viewed as the interaction of agents, and is frequently applied for analyzing their self-organization in complex systems. To decide their next behavior, such agents generally access spatial information that needs to be not only made available to the agents in local but also diffused over an entire simulation space. As an efficient implementation of information diffusion, we propose to combine the principle of cellular automata into the multiagent simulation. There, agents walk over cellular automata that diffuse spatial information. To evaluate its efficiency, we have facilitated such information diffusion on top of the M++ parallel multiagent simulator. Our performance experiment showed that implementing cellular automata in the Codi-1bit multiagent simulation achieved 2.18-time speed-up when using 8 processors, as compared to the one with no support of cellular automata.