Fairness in Agent Based Simulation Frameworks

Abstract

An agent based simulation engine should be able to provide a fair playing field for its agents. This paper analyzes fairness in the sequencing of agent thread execution within a Java framework that implements a multithreaded, time stepping, agent based simulation engine. The results illustrate why a multithreaded agent based simulation framework using the Java Virtual Machine for concurrency must supplement standard Java thread scheduling with techniques that enable fairness in agent execution order. The “uniform specific notification” pattern is introduced as one technique for producing fairer, uniformly distributed order for initial execution of Java agent threads at each simulation step.