![](bg8.png)
agents interact. EIS’s environment model contains
controllable components on which agents act and in-
teract. These controllable components can be used to
represent shared entities. Nevertheless, time synchro-
nization on actions is still needed. For instance with
EIS, the environment interface does not provide any
time synchronization mechanism as it is originally
meant for agent platforms and not for simulations in
particular. Since the shared entities would live in the
environment model, shared entities with synchroniza-
tion constraints can not be handled. Thus the impos-
sibility of case 3.
Finally, implemented model composition solu-
tions like MECSYCO deals with specific type of sim-
ulations, abiding by specific interfaces in their imple-
mentations. As such, they only allow to couple sim-
ulations as a whole (case 1) and not the coupling of
agents across different simulations. Thus not enabling
to implement such a network in figure 1.
4 CONCLUSION
This paper presented a challenge to microscopic sim-
ulations coupling that is yet to be addressed by exist-
ing coupling solutions. This challenge arises when
designing the coupling of simulations where com-
ponents on which synchronization is required, are
shared. We defined the concept of shared entities to
report of components sharing between coupled simu-
lations. To show the limitations of existing coupling
solutions with regards to this challenge, we proceeded
to study the constraint resulting from different cou-
pling objective on coupled MABS, with we repre-
sented using the DTSS formalism. We showed that
the limitations are due to a lack of active scheduling
approach by the current solutions.
Our future work is targeted to the proposal of a
coupling model that takes into account the shared en-
tity challenge. For genericity purposes, and along side
the coupling model, we will work on a formal frame-
work to define coupling objectives in terms of inter-
operability and scheduling relations between a set of
simulations to be coupled. A formalization of cou-
pling objectives will enable to detect inconsistencies
before the implementation. It will also enable their
structural analysis in order to correspond to a given
coupling objective, the suitable coupling solutions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was carried out thanks to funds from
Rhone-Alpes Region’s ARC 7 program (www.arc7-
territoires-mobilites.rhonealpes.fr): ”Innovations,
mobilit
´
es, territoires et dynamiques urbaines”.
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