A friend of mine defended his Ph.D. Thesis on MAS simulation. He covers several interesting field like Holonic Multi-Agent Systems, Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, Complex systems, Organizational approach and Multilevel simulation.
If you are interested in these subjects you should take a look.
Nicolas’ Home page and his Ph.D. Thesis
Abstract
The work, presented in this PhD thesis, is concerned with the study of complex systems and aims at providing a full set of abstractions and the associated methodological guidelines for the analysis, design, implementation and simulation of Holonic MultiAgent Systems (HMAS). HMAS offers a promising software engineering approach for developing complex open software systems. This kind of systems consists in self-similar structures called holons. A set of holons may be seen, depending on the level of observation, as a unique entity or as a group of holons in interaction. A complex system is made up of a large number of parts that have many interactions. In such systems, the behavior of the whole cannot be directly understood only by knowing the behavior of the parts and their interactions. Complex systems often exhibit a hierarchical structure. The foundation of this thesis consist in exploiting the intrinsic hierarchical structure of complex systems to analyse and decompose them. In order to conceive modular and reusable models, an organizational approach is adopted. The principle of the analysis is based on the identification of a hierarchy of organizations, which the global behavior may represent the system under the chosen perspective. The behaviors of the system are recursively decomposed into a set of interacting sub-behaviors, each of these latter being in turn decomposed until we reach some lowest level of elementary sub-behaviors. At a given level, the composed behavior is modeled using an organization, and the associated sub-behaviors using roles. This hierarchical organization structure is then mapped to an holarchy (hierarchy of holons) in charge of its execution. The concepts presented are then used to study the issues related to the multilevel multiagent simulation. The resulting model is finally applied to the pedestrians simulation in virtual urban environment.