SSP Group Meeting
Wednesday, February 18th, 11am-12pm
Department of Artificial Intelligence, 80 South Bridge, Room F13


 

Time Granularity in Simulation Models within a Multi-Agent System

Edjard Mota

The understanding of how processes in natural phenomena interact at different scales of time has been a great challenge for humans. How information is transferred across scales is fundamental if one tries to scale up from finer to coarse levels of granularity. Computer simulation has been a powerful tool to determine the appropriate amount of detail one has to impose when developing simulation models of such phenomena. However, it has proved difficult to represent change at many scales of time and subject to cyclical processes.

Traditionally, models of ecosystems have been developed using imperative languages. Very few of those temporal logic theories have been applied for the specification of simulation models in ecology. The aggregation of processes working at different scales of time is difficult (sometimes impossible) to do reliably. The reason is because these processes influence each other, and their functionality does not always scale to other levels. Thus the problems to tackle are representing cyclical and interacting processes at many scales and providing a framework to make the integration of such processes more reliable.

In this talk I shall present the achievements of my PhD research in the last 3 years. This provides a multi-agent architecture for dealing the specification of simulation models in a distributed environment.