Incomplete Information Exchange in a Simulation Environment: a Communication Layer Approach

The paper presents a communication layer, fitted to simulate incomplete information exchange among software agents inhabiting a simulation environment. The communication layer is designed to ensure simulation repeatability at the message exchange level. Message exchange impact on repeatability is found to have some addressable open issues within RoboCup-Rescue simulation environment’s present stage. The RoboCup-Rescue simulation environment architectural model is considered. This model considers multiple heterogeneous software agents and several domain specific aspect simulators. In this model, a set of communicative acts sustains all inter-agent information exchange as well as agent-world acting and sensing capabilities. RoboCup-Rescue communicative acts are classified from the simulation repeatability perspective. It is assumed that agent’s information exchange model, follows a connectionless simple request-reply communication pattern. A reliable UDP-based protocol, less resource demanding than TCP, is proposed. Incomplete information exchange is regarded as a nonfunctional facet. Knowledge of the environment communicative acts is introduced at the communication layer, so that application level independency is achieved on that nonfunctional facet. The paper describes the experiments and presents the results that validate the proposal of an UDP-based reliable protocol. The RoboCup-Rescue simulation environment is used to materialize and analyze the proposed classification of communicative acts.