The distributed simulation of multiagent systems

Agent-based systems are increasingly being applied in a wide range of areas including telecommunications, business process modeling, computer games, c ontrol of mobile robots, and military simulations. Such systems are typical ly extremely complex and it is often useful to be able to simulate on agent -based system to learn more about its behaviour or investigate the implicat ions of alternative architectures. In this paper, we discuss the applicatio n of distributed discrete-event simulation techniques to the simulation of multiagent systems. We identify the efficient distribution of the agents' e nvironment as a key problem in the simulation of agent-based systems and pr esent an approach to the decomposition of the environment that facilitates load balancing.