Implementing Sensible Agents in a Distributed Simulation Environment

The practical deployment of distributed agent-based systems mandates that each agent behaves sensibly. This paper focuses on simulating the behaviors of Sensible Agents in dynamic and uncertain environments. Sensible Agents perceive, process, and respond based on an understanding of both local and system goals. In previous research, a Sensible Agent architecture has been developed in which each Sensible Agent is composed of five modules: a Self-Agent Modeler, an External Agent Modeler, an Action Planner, an Autonomy Reasoner, and a Conflict Resolution Advisor. In this paper we present a distributed simulation implementation that exploits the IEEE 1278.1 Distributed Interactive Simulation standard. Furthermore, we employ the Knowledge Query Manipulation Language (KQML) as a semantic basis for communication both between agents (i.e., inter-agent) and with the environment, and the Java Event model for communication between Agent modules (i.e., intra-agent).