To BDI, or not to BDI: design choices in an agent-based traffic flow management simulation

  • Authors:
  • Shawn R. Wolfe;Maarten Sierhuis;Peter A. Jarvis

  • Affiliations:
  • NASA Ames Research Center;RIACS/NASA Ames Research Center;Perot Systems Government Services/NASA Ames Research Center

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2008 Spring simulation multiconference
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) is a powerful agent paradigm that allows for the development of so-called intelligent agents - agents that can reason and act based on their beliefs and intentions. However, this power often comes at the cost of increased computational overhead. We describe our experience using a BDI agent framework for developing a simulation of collaborative air traffic flow management and the efficiency problems we encountered. By using BDI more judiciously in our simulation, we were able to address these issues and greatly reduce the execution time of our simulation. From our successes and failures, we derive several guidelines that may enable other researchers to avoid similar efficiency issues in BDI-based simulations.