btearwhy/Multi-Agent-System

General documentation for the PacketWorld Application

This project contains code for the PacketWorld Application, a simple Multi-agent framework to develop and evaluate pickup and delivery problems.

Project structure

The project consists of two main parts: (1) the source code and (2) configuration files.

The source code is located under the src directory. In the source code you can find 6 main packages:

• agent: Implementations of different agent behaviors and behavior changes.
• environment: Code related to the environment as well as definitions for worlds in the applications.
• gui: Code related to the Graphical User Interface.
• support: Classes which support the functionality of the application.
• synchronizer: Classes used to realize synchronization in the application.
• util: General purpose classes and functions used within the project.

Configuration files can be found in the configfiles directory. A distinction is made between behaviors and environments. A behavior configuration file describes the different behavior states an agent can have, and how an agent can transition between these states.

An environment configuration file describes an environment in which the selected implementation is evaluated. The environment contains information about agents, packets, energy stations, etc.

Running the code

The project uses Apache Maven as a build framework, and is written in Java version 17 or above. To compile the code, simply run the following command:

mvn compile

To run the code we use the maven exec plugin. The plugin can be invoked as follows:

mvn exec:java

If desired, you can clear previously built source files with the following command:

mvn clean

Lastly, if you want to adhere to the coding style of the project, you can run the following command:

mvn checkstyle:check

Final notes

• To quickly get started, make sure to take a look at the example implementation provided in the configuration file configfiles/behaviors/wander.txt and the java source file src/main/java/agent/behavior/wander/Wander.java.
• It is not necessary to manually edit environment configuration files. If you would like to test different scenarios than the ones already provided, simply choose the environment editor in the main menu of the application to edit or create new environments.
• After (or during) a normal run, you can export the monitored actions of agents in your run together with some metadata about the run. Navigate to the Actions window and click on the export button. For batch runs this is done automatically by specifying the output file before starting the runs.