SPADES - a distributed agent simulation environment with software-in-the-loop execution

Simulations are used extensively for studying artificial intelligence. However, the simulation technology in use by and designed for the artificial intelligence community often fails to take advantage of much of the work by the larger simulation community to produce distributed, repeatable, and efficient simulations. We present the system for parallel agent discrete event simulation, (SPADES), which is a simulation environment for the artificial intelligence community. SPADES focuses on the agent as a fundamental simulation component. The thinking time of an agent is tracked and reflected in the results of the agents´ actions by using a software-in-the-loop mechanism. SPADES supports distributed execution of the agents across multiple systems, while at the same time producing repeatable results regardless of network or system load. We discuss the design of SPADES and give experimental results. SPADES is flexible enough for a variety of application domains in the artificial intelligence research community.