Simulation of an Organization of Spatial Intelligent Agents in the Visual C#.NET Framework

Abstract

 Abstract—Problem: This paper investigates the simulation of a community of spatial intelligent agents, an important issue for the implementation and evaluation of distributed algorithms. The research question is how to simulate this organization using Visual C#.NET. Objective: This paper intends to use the C# programming language to develop a simulator. In a simulated environment, a social agent needs to communicate with other agents and respond to received messages. Method: Our approach is to integrate the thread and delegate methods provided by the .NET framework. We enhance the architecture of a spatial intelligent agent in order to embed several in a simulated society. A basic C# program is presented to demonstrate how to implement a contract net protocol (CNP) among three simple agents. Results: Two results were achieved: 1) the responses and actions of three agents during a simulated CNP and 2) a simulated environment that contains distributed spatial intelligent agents that can interact with each other and a human user. Conclusion: The proposed methodology and presented code provide a flexible and efficient framework for C# developers to develop, simulate, and evaluate a society of advanced software agents using the .NET platform.