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Naoki Fukuta
Graduate School of Informatics
Shizuoka University
Hamamatsu, Japan
fukuta@cs.inf.shizuoka.ac.jp
I. I NTRODUCTION
Multi-agent simulation has been applied to various elds,
including trafc simulation[1], crowd simulation[11], evacuation simulation of the airport[6], etc. On deploying a
good agent simulation, it is important to be able to handle
details in a simulation. In [6], it was introduced that the
proposed agent simulation for an evacuation simulation in
an airport, could handle details of the feeling and the human
relations. It shows that the human beings may not be able
to escape in a certain disaster scenario that were considered
as a safe case for evacuation. To analyze how vehicles
and people act in unusual situations, such as disasters or
events, or to investigate the case that the precise behaviors
of people might affect greatly in the overall behaviors,
agents need to dynamically respond to their environmental
changes. In such a situation, agents should be coded to
respond to such environmental changes and therefore it is
important to be able to handle them in a simulation to run
it in a reasonable time. As an example scenario that agents
have to dynamically respond to such environmental changes,
replanning of the car-agent on a road trafc simulation
should run within a ne grained time in the simulation[3].
It is one of the promising issues to realize a multi-agent
simulation on a large scale. In actual situations, even if
considering a trafc simulation that covers just one city,
it should be inuenced by the trafcs from and to other
connected cities, and in order to simulate a trafc in one city
without considering trafc ows into the city, it is important
to handle millions of vehicles in the simulation to reproduce
the actual phenomenon happening there. For example, a
multi-agent simulation was proposed which considers what
978-0-7695-5071-8/13 $26.00 2013 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/IIAI-AAI.2013.75
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IV. I MPLEMENTATION
We implemented a runtime platform based on the framework we proposed in the previous section. Figure2 shows
the overview of the runtime platform that we implemented.
It can perform a simple road trafc simulation, and perform
an agents internal processing (e.g., dynamic planning) using
OpenCL-based codings. We implemented four major path
planning algorithms, Dijkstra, A*, RTA*[5], and LRTA*[10]
as a sample code set for further investigation of the users of
our framework.
We conducted a preliminary evaluation for its parallel
processing performance on the path planning algorithms
to validate the potential scalability of our framework. On
each planning problem, each agent receives an origin and
a destination randomly, then we measured the processing
time for the whole processing where all agents retrieved the
route on various conditions in the scale, parameters, and
parallelizing methods that can be specied on OpenCL.
Here, to keep simplicity of the evaluation we used a map
which consists of the 22 links among 12 nodes. We used a
MacBook Pro(os: OS X 10.8.2, cpu: 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2
Duo, compiler: gcc4.2.1 build 5658, gpu: NVIDIA GeForce
320M, memory: 8GB 1067 MHz DDR3) as the experiment
execution environment.
Figure 3 shows the results of total processing time executed by GPU(using OpenCL) for two planning algorithms:
Dijkstra and A*. The horizontal axis shows the number of
agents and the vertical axis shows their processing time.
The graph shows four conditions; GPU sequential path
planning, GPU sequential all process , GPU parallel path
planning, and GPU parallel all process.
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V. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we presented a framework to help investigate that multi-agent simulations could be scaled up
which would be used as an approach to analyze what could
happen in large scale simulations covering the movements
of people, vehicles and moving objects when disasters or
events occurred. We proposed the framework which could be
useful for investigating scalability issues on such simulations
running on GPU computing resources. We presented a
preliminary case study on a multi-agent trafc simulation
with dynamic road situation changes. For instance, agents
can perform replanning during its short simulation period in
consideration of changes of the road network by disasters,
trafc congestions, and other reasons. We initially prepared
an OpenCL-based implementation on our runtime platform
to cover major four planning algorithms. By using the
proposed framework, when the agents actions are coded
using OpenCL, our framework could reduce the load in
analyzing characteristics of each GPU types, parameters, etc.
Future work includes an evaluation of effectiveness of our
proposed framework on an actual scalability improvement
scenario on a specic simulation problem. In addition,
to make it easy to utilize two or more GPU(s) on our
framework. There could be several approaches utilizing two
or more GPU(s). For example, use two or more GPU(s)
in one computer is one possible scenario, and also run it
on two or more computers each of which has single GPU,
and their combinations. Because it is not easy to prepare all
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R EFERENCES
[9] P. Harish and P. J. Narayanan. Accelerating large graph algorithms on the gpu using cuda. In Proc. of the 14th international
conference on High performance computing, HiPC07, pages
197208, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007. Springer-Verlag.
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