Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/R45338/01
Title:	Distributed Simulation of Agent-Based Systems (Acronym: PDES-MAS)
Principal Investigator:	Theodoropoulos, Professor G
Other Investigators:	Logan, Professor B
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department:	School of Computer Science
Organisation:	University of Birmingham
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	05 November 2001	Ends:	04 July 2005	Value (£):	212,511
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Networks & Distributed Systems
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Aerospace, Defence and Marine Environment Creative Industries Information Technologies
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
There has been considerable recent interest in agent-based systems, systems based on autonomous software and/or hardware components (agents) which cooperate within an environment to perform some task. Agents are increasingly being applied in a wide range of areas including telecomms, business process modelling, computer games, control of mobile robots and military simulations. While agents offer great promise, adoption of this new technology has been hampered by the limitations of current development tools and methodologies. Design and implementation remains largely experimental, and experimental approaches are likely to remain important for the foreseeable future. In this context, simulation has a key role to play in the development of agent-based systems, allowing the agent designer to learn more about the behaviour of the system or to investigate the implications of alternative architectures. However, the computational requirements of simulations of agent-based systems far exceed the capabilities of conventional sequential von Neumann computer systems and parallel simulation emerges as a viable solution to this problem. However, work to date has largely ignored recent work in simulation methodology and systems, and has tended to employ various ad-hoc approaches to parallel simulation, and, as a result, the simulations often have relatively poor performance, limiting the nature and scope of the experiments that can be performed. The proposal aims to develop appropriate algorithms and techniques to support the efficient decentralised, event driven parallel simulation of agent based systems.
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Organisation Website:	http://www.bham.ac.uk