agents of agents

[Marcello Gallucci]

Hello,
it would sound strange, but I'm trying to build a world of agents composed by
agents. That is , a hierachical model where each agent (SuperAgent) is
represented by a given number of agents (Units).

I'm  following  two alternative strategies, each with troubles somewhere.

1) first, the simple way: a very simple swarm implementation (say like
Heatbugs): An agent type, a modelSwarm, an observerSwarm. The only difference
with a HeatBugs-like model is that the agents (units) belongs to different
lists, each list being a "virtual" superAgent. So, by looking at the list
members, each unit (and myself) knows who belongs to the same superAgent. This
makes very easy for  superAgents to communicate (that is important for my
experiments). It's also very easy to represent them in a raster, since all
units lay in the same toroid.  The problem is that each superAgent is flat,
that is I cannot wrap the units within each superAgent. I'd like each
superAgent to be a toroid. Assume you have two superAgent (1 and 2) formed by 5
units. They will lay in the raster as follow: 
........................
.....1........2......
...111...222.....
.....1........2.......
.........................
How can I say to the 1's to interact among themself, the 2' to interact among
themselves and not with the doted squares? (I hope it's clear what I mean)

2) The second strategy is to create a superAgent that is actually a swarmModel,
with everything inside: activity, toroid, raster schedule etc. Then I build a
list of superAgents and make them interact. It's like having many Heatbugs
models running at the same time, with some message broadcast among them.
The problem here is to build a action schedule, that says to each swarmModel to
activate its own schedule, do stuff, and return the controll to a
superSchedule. Is that possible? Are there examples that I can follow?

I know this is weired, but I sow a lots of brilliant emails out there in the
mailing list, and I hope someone can help me out. Which strategy do you think
is more sensible? Do you think there are better strategies? Is there anybody
who already implemented something like this? Do you have any suggestion? 

Thanks a lot an sorry for the question.

cheers
marcello

 -- 
Marcello Gallucci (Ph.D)

Department of Social Psychology
Free University 
Van der Boechorststraat 1 
1081 BT Amsterdam (NL)
Tel. +31(0)20 4448846


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