Toward the New Version of D-MASON: Efficiency, Effectiveness and Correctness in Parallel and Distributed Agent-Based Simulations

Agent-Based Models (ABMs) denote a class of models which, by simulating the behavior of multiple agents (i.e., independent actions, interactions and adaptation), aim to emulate and/or predict complex phenomena. One of the general features of ABM simulations is their experimental capacity, that requires a viable and reliable infrastructure to interact with a running simulation, monitoring its behaviour, as it proceeds, and applying changes to the configurations at run time, in order to study "what if" scenarios. A common approach for improving the efficiency and the effectiveness of ABMs as a research tool is to distribute the overall computation on a number of machines, which makes the design of the simulation model particularly challenging. D-MASON framework is a distributed version of the MASON library for writing and running Agent-based simulations. We briefly present D-MASON architecture and functionalities. Then we presents its novel features: a distributed network field and a novel communication layer dedicated to massive parallel machines. The main contribution of the paper is in providing a memory consistency modeling, where the previous state of theagent is made available (consistently) for all other agents (even the one on other processors) and this is obtained by exploiting the Java Method Handler mechanism. Full documentation, additional tutorials and other material can be found at www.dmason.org where the framework can be downloaded.