Affiliations: School of Science and Technology, Hellenic Open University, Patra, Greece
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Chairi Kiourt, School of Science and Technology, Hellenic Open University, Patra, GR-26335, Greece. Tel.: +30 6949079760; E-mail:[email protected]
Abstract: The simulation of societies requires vast amounts of computing resources,
which must be managed over distributed or high performance computing
infrastructures to provide for cost-effective experimentation. To that end,
this paper presents a novel platform for the segmentation and management of
social simulation experiments in game-playing multi-agent systems; the
platform, also serves as a working proof of concept for similar experiments.
The platform is managed through a web-based graphical user interface, to
combine the advantages of powerful grid infrastructure middleware and
sophisticated workflow systems in a way that some generic functionality is
sacrificed for the benefit of obtaining a smooth and brief learning curve,
without compromising security. The paper sets out the architecture and
implementation details of the platform and demonstrates its use with two
sample games, RLGame and Rock Scissors Paper, to underline the scale of the
experiments and to indicate the class of social simulation problems that it
can help investigate. The platform can be loosely coupled with analytics
software for data mining; for our sample problems, this analysis leads to
associating the learning mechanism each agent employs with its eventual
performance ranking.
Keywords: Distributed computing, multi-agent systems, game playing, social simulation
