Scalability in Distributed Multi-Agent Based Simulations: The JADE Case

Agent platforms provide a framework for development and execution of parallel applications such as multi-agent based simulation (MABS). However, these platforms have limitations to support large-scale MABS applications in practice. This paper aims at investigating and improving the performance of an agent platform with a MABS workload in distributed environments. We carried out an experimental study with the JADE framework as our agent platform. The experiments show the performance characteristics of the workload and that JADE does not scale well due to message transport and agent directory service limitations. We propose solutions to overcome these performance bottlenecks and facilitate the efficient execution of MABS in a distributed environment. Initial experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approaches.