Agent Systems and their Applications – a Biased Perspective
Marcin Paprzycki
IEEE CS DVP
http://agentlab.swps.edu.pl
Systems Research InstitutePolish Academy of Sciences
Research supported by EU Project E-CAP
IntroductionIntroduction
Agent Technology Metaphors (1) Based on human agents
travel agent insurance agent real-estate agent personal assistant (a.k.a. secretary)
Result agentshave specialized knowledgerepresent our interests find / filter / customize information
P. Maes, Agents that Reduce Work and Information Overload, CACM, 37, 1994, 31-40
Agent Technology Metaphors (2) Agents as “effect” of software evolution
OOactive objectsagents
Result agentsmethodology for software creation
complex systems build out of interacting intelligent agents
? using agent environments ?
N. R. Jennings, An agent-based approach for building complex software systems, CACM, 44 (4), 2001, 35-41
Agent Technology (3) Other agents
Bio-agents (J. Liu, 2001) based on cellular automata / “ants” simple behavior (no intelligence) “intelligence” emergent behavior
Embodied agents Agent-robots (robo-soccer)
Agents in modeling and simulations modeling social interactions (H. Hexmoor, 2003)
modeling crowd behavior (Bandini, 2005)
What does exist? (1) Industry
well kept industrial secretsMitsubishi used Concordia for ???Daimler-Chrysler – production flow control
prototype – 2001 working product – 2005/06 gain 10-20% effectiveness claimed
dynamic transport optimization overall cost reduction – about 11%
wineries in East Australia – flow of wine designed using agent tools implemented using C++
What does exist? (2) Academic paper content
lack of regard for FIPA standards (why? better now) frameworks and UML diagrams (tedious, ?easy?) new environments (easy) screen-shots of the interface (easy) initial implementation results (almost easy) no continued implementation effort (difficult) systems with few agents only (why?)
Why Few Agents Only? Size matters!
a lot of agents - how many? a lot of messages - how many?
Need for experiments no “benchmarks” for agent systems agent system “scalability” not “fashionable”
Comments we do not try to establish “benchmarks” just a “feeling” how large can we get?
Experimental Setup JADE 3.1 agent platform Hardware
Sun workstations UltraSparc III (300 MHz) + 198 Mbytes of RAM
PC’s Pentium II (120 MHz) + 48 Mbytes of RAM
Cisco Switch 100 Mbit/s full backplane
Other machines also tried (http://agentlab.swps.edu.pl) K. Chmiel, M. Gawinecki, P. Kaczmarek, M. Szymczak, M. Paprzycki (2005)
Efficiency of JADE Agent Platform, Scientific Programming, 13(2), 159-172 K. Chmiel, D. Tomiak, M. Gawinecki, P. Kaczmarek, M. Szymczak, M.
Paprzycki (2004) Testing the Efficiency of JADE Agent Platform. In: Proceedings of the ISPDC 2004 Conference, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 49-57
Spamming Test (1)
Spamming direction
Computer 1
Spammer
User
Computer 2
Spammer
User
Computer 3
Spammer
User
Each machine spammer and user
Spammers send 5000 ACL messages to all users on all machines
Users process messagesmessages stored in
the queue Message size 300
ASCI characters + ACL wrapper
Spamming Test (2)
Agent pairs
Spamming time [ms]
Receivingtime [ms]
2 40034 87053
3 24440 141778
4 25128 217501
5 25217 313625
6 28843 448181
7 35164 634847
8 40624 821341
0
5
10
15
20
25
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
agent "pairs"
tim
e p
er m
essa
ge
[ms]
Spamming
Receiving
Time per message spamming almost “flat” / receiving practically linear
320,000 messages (100 Mbytes of data) processed (in 14 minutes)
Agents in an E-shop• Mother Client sends
Clients (C) to the store• Mother Shop
generates Sellers for each Client
• Seller and Client negotiate and report results of negotiations
• Mother Clients on separate machines
• Results for 30, 40, …, 120 Clients generated
• Scaled to 1450+
0
20000
40000
60000
80000
100000
1 2 3 4 5Number of M otherClient agents
Tim
e (m
s)
Comments On outdated hardware agent systems
“scaled” to: 1400+ agents 320,000 messages
We also did run 2000+ agents on better hardware
All “properties” scaled linearly No restrictions related to JADE but to
computer hardware and network speed
Large agent systems can be implemented!
End of End of IntroductionIntroduction
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