Wednesday 27 February 2008

Deviation- back to FLAME methods

Due to Eurace visit, have to stop work on state generation and turn back to FLAME methods to code up the ipd game example. Probably later I can use this coded example and modify it to states in a month's time:).

Friday 22 February 2008

The drive towards event-based agents

Flame allows the iterations to be represented by the shortest time scale a model could possess. This creates problems for issues where agents would be reactive and accordingly change their behvaiour during the course of the model. A way to inhabit this aspect is a turn towards state based modelling of agents. Every iteration would then be represented as the path from the start state of the agent to the end state of the agent in that one iteration. This would map behaviours of agents with deliberative and reactive natures corrently into the model and can also see a possible extension to the hierarchy of various models embedded into each other. Consequently, this raises the problem of parallelisation of agents. This leads me to question whether we need to have synchronisation points or if we were to remove them would deadlocks still arise? If so how would this be handled. Lack of correct use of formal definition of agents in Flame is causing discrepancies!