MASSE: environment supporting for simulation and analysis of multiagent systems

Abstract

In multiagent system research, the work in building simulation model and the effort in developing analysis methods are closely related because building multiagent models relies heavily on new effective analysis methods while justifying new analysis methods needs the simulation results of multiagent models. MASSE (Multiagent Simulation Systematic Explorer) was proposed as an integrated environment which is aimed at (a) to conduct efficient simulation by intelligent scheduling, (b) to conduct intelligent data analysis and knowledge discovery on simulation data, and (c) to develop such analysis methods themselves. Current implementation of MASSE is described in this manuscript, and its usefulness is shown in three aspects: simple accommodation of existing simulators, satisfactory performance for adopting grid computing technique, and systematic data analysis tool. Collaboration among simulation developers and analysts can be strongly supported by using MASSE to incorporate various simulators and unified method for data analysis. We conclude that the current implementation of MASSE is satisfactory