Agent Interaction via Message-Based Belief Communication

This work reflects continued research into "temporally autonomous" multi-agent interaction. Many traditional approaches to modeling multi-agent systems involve synchronizing all agent activity in simulated environments to a single "universal'' clock. In other words, agent behavior is regulated by a global timer where all agents act and interact deterministically in time. However, if the objective of any such simulation is to model the behavior of real-world entities, this discrete timing mechanism yields an artificial reflection of actual physical agent interaction. In addition to the behavioral autonomy normally associated with agents, simulated agents must also have temporal autonomy in order to interact realistically. Inter communication should occur without global coordination or synchronization. To this end, a specialized simulation framework is developed, several simulations are then conducted from which data are gathered and it is subsequently demonstrated that manipulation of the timing variable amongst interacting agents affects the emergent behaviors of agent populations.