Agent Systems and their Applications – a Biased Perspective

Marcin Paprzycki

IEEE CS DVP

http://agentlab.swps.edu.pl

Systems Research InstitutePolish Academy of Sciences

Research supported by EU Project E-CAP

IntroductionIntroduction

Agent Technology Metaphors (1) Based on human agents

travel agent insurance agent real-estate agent personal assistant (a.k.a. secretary)

Result agentshave specialized knowledgerepresent our interests find / filter / customize information

P. Maes, Agents that Reduce Work and Information Overload, CACM, 37, 1994, 31-40

Agent Technology Metaphors (2) Agents as “effect” of software evolution

OOactive objectsagents

Result agentsmethodology for software creation

complex systems build out of interacting intelligent agents

? using agent environments ?

N. R. Jennings, An agent-based approach for building complex software systems, CACM, 44 (4), 2001, 35-41

Agent Technology (3) Other agents

Bio-agents (J. Liu, 2001) based on cellular automata / “ants” simple behavior (no intelligence) “intelligence” emergent behavior

Embodied agents Agent-robots (robo-soccer)

Agents in modeling and simulations modeling social interactions (H. Hexmoor, 2003)

modeling crowd behavior (Bandini, 2005)

What does exist? (1) Industry

well kept industrial secretsMitsubishi used Concordia for ???Daimler-Chrysler – production flow control

prototype – 2001 working product – 2005/06 gain 10-20% effectiveness claimed

dynamic transport optimization overall cost reduction – about 11%

wineries in East Australia – flow of wine designed using agent tools implemented using C++

What does exist? (2) Academic paper content

lack of regard for FIPA standards (why? better now) frameworks and UML diagrams (tedious, ?easy?) new environments (easy) screen-shots of the interface (easy) initial implementation results (almost easy) no continued implementation effort (difficult) systems with few agents only (why?)

Why Few Agents Only? Size matters!

a lot of agents - how many? a lot of messages - how many?

Need for experiments no “benchmarks” for agent systems agent system “scalability” not “fashionable”

Comments we do not try to establish “benchmarks” just a “feeling” how large can we get?

Experimental Setup JADE 3.1 agent platform Hardware

Sun workstations UltraSparc III (300 MHz) + 198 Mbytes of RAM

PC’s Pentium II (120 MHz) + 48 Mbytes of RAM

Cisco Switch 100 Mbit/s full backplane

Other machines also tried (http://agentlab.swps.edu.pl) K. Chmiel, M. Gawinecki, P. Kaczmarek, M. Szymczak, M. Paprzycki (2005)

Efficiency of JADE Agent Platform, Scientific Programming, 13(2), 159-172 K. Chmiel, D. Tomiak, M. Gawinecki, P. Kaczmarek, M. Szymczak, M.

Paprzycki (2004) Testing the Efficiency of JADE Agent Platform. In: Proceedings of the ISPDC 2004 Conference, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 49-57

Spamming Test (1)

Spamming direction

Computer 1

Spammer

User

Computer 2

Spammer

User

Computer 3

Spammer

User

Each machine spammer and user

Spammers send 5000 ACL messages to all users on all machines

Users process messagesmessages stored in

the queue Message size 300

ASCI characters + ACL wrapper

Spamming Test (2)

Agent pairs

Spamming time [ms]

Receivingtime [ms]

2 40034 87053

3 24440 141778

4 25128 217501

5 25217 313625

6 28843 448181

7 35164 634847

8 40624 821341

0

5

10

15

20

25

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

agent "pairs"

tim

e p

er m

essa

ge

[ms]

Spamming

Receiving

Time per message spamming almost “flat” / receiving practically linear

320,000 messages (100 Mbytes of data) processed (in 14 minutes)

Agents in an E-shop• Mother Client sends

Clients (C) to the store• Mother Shop

generates Sellers for each Client

• Seller and Client negotiate and report results of negotiations

• Mother Clients on separate machines

• Results for 30, 40, …, 120 Clients generated

• Scaled to 1450+

0

20000

40000

60000

80000

100000

1 2 3 4 5Number of M otherClient agents

Tim

e (m

s)

Comments On outdated hardware agent systems

“scaled” to: 1400+ agents 320,000 messages

We also did run 2000+ agents on better hardware

All “properties” scaled linearly No restrictions related to JADE but to

computer hardware and network speed

Large agent systems can be implemented!

End of End of IntroductionIntroduction