Agent-based systems in hardware : implementation of simulations of complex systems using FPGAs

• Main Author: Gómez Zamorano, Antonio
• Published: University of York 2012
• Subjects: 621.395
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.583249

Complex Systems can be seen in many important events and aspects of our world. However, their study is not a trivial task due to the multiple complications found to access some of these systems, the complex and convoluted network of connections between elements and the amount of elements involved in them. This study also affects engineered systems, which have become more complex due to an increase in their size and number of interactions between their elements, resulting in unexpected misbehaviour that may potentially alter the results of the system. A traditional top-down analytical approach is not enough to completely understand Complex Systems, and a bottom-up agent-based approach has been suggested to be used to model and simulate them. Reconfigurable Hardware represents a suitable platform for the natural implementation of Agent-based Systems, used in the simulations of Complex Systems, providing the parallelism and flexibility that other platforms lack. The main aim of the work in this thesis is to present a study of how to implement and what are the benefits of implementing Agent-based System using Reconfigurable Hardware. A static implementation takes advantage of the parallelism and flexibility of Reconfigurable Hardware to implement Agent-based Systems, using a flexible decentralised communication structure, which provides the elements of the system with the required level of flexibility in their interactions. A suitable communication structure simplifies the behaviour of the processing elements. A dynamic implementation exploits dynamic reconfiguration in order to create a dynamic architecture, which facilitates the implementation of the dynamic behaviour of the agents by adapting to changes in their interactions. The communication between elements is simplified and the efficiency and flexibility of the system increases. This thesis presents the suitability of both implementations in the design of simulations of Complex Systems, exploiting the parallelism and flexibility of Reconfigurable Hardware, using Reynolds' Boids as case study, and highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.