Re: [Swarm-Support] Re: Opinions among swarm agents

[Steve Railsback]

Kanagaraj Krishna wrote:
> 
> Hi,
>    I'm working on a simulation regarding management of trust among agents in 
> multi-agent system trading society. I'm using java SWARM.
> 
> -Each agent in this model keeps info on past meetings with other agents for 
> trading. It keeps info such as (AgentID, trust rating, no of meetings, time 
> of meetings).
> 
> -Each agents have a list of their known/trusted(friends etc..) agents to get 
> info/opinion(trust rating) on other agents in the soiety before trading with 
> them.
> 
> This involves a lot of info, can Map be used for both functions, because as I 
> know it only keeps 2 kinds of info (ID,key). How can i fit all the infos 
> using Maps during simulation.
> 
> Are there any other alternative options?

The benefit of a map of course is that if you know a key value, you can
go directly to the object on the map for that key, instead of looping
through a list looking for the right object. 

One solution that may help you is creating a class for meeting
information: all its objects would do is hold values for AgentID, trust
rating, time of meeting, etc. THen every time an agent meets another
agent, it could instantiate a new meeting info object, store the meeting
information in it, and put it on a map. 

Another trick to remember is that the object you put on a map could be
another map, or a list- So you could have one map keyed by what agents
you have met with, and at each such key there is another map keyed by
meeting...or just a list of meeting info objects. 

Steve

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