An Agent Infrastructure over HLA for Distributed Simulation of Reconfigurable Systems and its Application to UAV Coordination*

Abstract

This paper proposes an agent infrastructure (Theatre) centered on Java for distributed simulations over High-Level Architecture/RunTime Infrastructure (HLA/RTI). The architecture rests on actors (agents) as the basic building blocks. Actors have a public message interface and encapsulate a state of local variables and a behavior patterned as a finite state machine. Actors interact with one another by asynchronous message passing. At the system level, theatres are used as the execution platforms for actors. Theatres naturally map on to HLA federates. Actors can migrate between theatres for load-balancing concerns, or in response to (re)configuration operations of dynamic structure systems. The paper introduces Theatre and demonstrates its application to a complex simulation model based on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The case study is an open agent-based distributed model where mobile agents follow communication patterns established at runtime.