Organizational patterns for data management in large-scale distributed multiagent systems

• Authors: William Wright;Dana Moore;Michael Thome
• Venue: AAMAS '03 Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
• Year: 2003

One of the important advantages of a distributed multi-agent system comes from the parallelism that can be realized by distributing data over a network of agents. A properly designed distributed agent system can scale to handle arbitrarily large data sets by adding more computers, network bandwidth, and storage. However, this scalability comes at a price. In this paper, we show how a naive approach to data management in a distributed agent system unnecessarily limits its scalability and present our approach to data management and visualization using the Cougaar agent architecture. Finally, we examine the implementation of a distributed MAS realized as three systems of increasing scale and analyze how these principles were and were not followed in an actual, functional system.