Coupling multiagent systems and environmental data

Nowadays, multiagent systems are very often used to run environmental simulations. These simulations need to use real environmental information. Unfortunately organizations (or companies), which can be everywhere in the world, very often hold these information. This fact has brought us to build a generic multiagent platform that is able to dynamically get distributed information throughout Internet. This platform can use two different network protocols: UDP and the RMI technology provided by Java. We explain in this paper how this platform is implemented and we give some benchmarks in order to compare the best solution for us between UDP and RMI. Finally, we applied this architecture to a case study: the shoal of swordfishes motion.