This paper provides a survey and analysis of applications of Agent Based Simulation (ABS). A framework for describing and assessing the applications is presented and systematically applied. A general conclusion from the study is that even if ABS seems a promising approach to many problems involving simulation of complex systems of interacting entities, it seems as the full potential of the agent concept and previous research and development within ABS often is not utilized. We illustrate this by providing some concrete examples. Another conclusion is that important information of the applications, in particular concerning the implementation of the simulator, was missing in many papers. As an attempt to encourage improvements we provide some guidelines for writing ABS application papers.

The computational Grid is an infrastructure which enables the execution of applications demanding huge computing resources. Hence, it can be the right environment for large-scale Multi-agent based simulation (MABS) applications. However, due to the nature of the Grid and the characteristics of MABS, achieving optimum performance poses a great challenge. Performance study of MABS applications is therefore a necessary undertaking which requires an understanding of these characteristics and the extent of their influence. Moreover, owing to the dynamicity and heterogeneity of the Grid, it is difficult to achieve performance gains without a middleware support for application deployment and dynamic reconfiguration. This paper presents a study of the key features of MABS applications that affect performance and proposes a supportive middleware to MABS platforms. Experiments show that the proposed middleware can bring performance improvement for MABS applications on the Grid.

A major requirement for Grid application developers is ensuring performance and scalability of their applications. Predicting the performance of an application demands understanding its specific features. This paper discusses performance modeling and prediction of multi-agent based simulation (MABS) applications on the Grid. An experiment conducted using a synthetic MABS workload explains the key features to be included in the performance model. The results obtained from the experiment show that the prediction model developed for the synthetic workload can be used as a guideline to understand to estimate the performance characteristics of real world simulation applications.

Using simulation environments to support mobile distributed application development has many benefits. Since mobile devices can be modeled as autonomous intelligent agents, the multi agent based simulation (MABS) approach is useful for such applications. In this paper, we propose a MABS platform on the computational Grid for mobile distributed computing. A prototype of the proposed platform is implemented and its performance characteristics are studied The findings of the experiment show that a Grid based MABS platform can provide a scalable simulation environment for mobile distributed applications.