Large-scale or massive agent simulations (i.e. simulations exceeding 1 million agents) are believed to better adhere to the modelled phenomena. There are, however, number of issues that needs to be addressed. Primarily, a seamless workload distribution along the computing nodes is of a major concern. Correspondingly, issues in agent communication and task synchronization are to be taken into account. Currently, there are not many publicly available environments for large-scale agent simulations. Thus, in the scope of the project a large-scale agent environment is being developed. The environment is being inspired by JADE and AnyLogic but overcoming some of the shortcomings that limits their use in distributed computing.

Technologies utilized (middleware)

• ICE (http://www.zeroc.com/ice.html)

• ZeroMQ (http://zeromq.org/)

Project milestones

• September 2013 - development started

• January 2014 – communication and synchronization protocol elaborated

• May 2014 – pilot simulation (up to 5 mil agents)