Sarah Hickmott

AAMAS Conference 2012 Conference Paper

An Adaptive System for Proactively Supporting Sustainability Goals

• Sarah Hickmott
• Liam Magee
• James Thom
• Lin Padgham

AAMAS Conference 2010 Conference Paper

An Architecture for Modular Distributed Simulation with Agent-Based Models

• David Scerri
• Sarah Hickmott
• Alexis Drogoul
• Lin Padgham

Agent-based simulations are an increasingly popular meansof exploring and understanding complex social systems. Inorder to be useful, these simulations must capture a range ofaspects of the modeled situation, each possibly requiring distinct expertise. Moreover, different paradigms may be usefulin modelling, ranging from those that use many lightweightreactive agents, to those that use cognitive agents, to thosethat focus on agent teams and organisational structures. There is need for an architecture which supports the development of a large simulation, through the integrationof separately developed modules. This paper describes aframework and architecture which facilitates the integrationof multiple agent-based simulations into a single globalsimulation. This architecture naturally supports distributedsimulation and incremental development, which are waysof addressing the computational and conceptual complexityof such systems. In this paper we focus particularly onhow to ensure proper management of simulation data thatis affected by agents in different modules, at the samelogical time. We also provide some preliminary performanceevaluation addressing scalability, as well as a comparison ofhow other available systems handle the issue of shared data.

AAMAS Conference 2010 Conference Paper

Bushfire BLOCKS: A Modular Agent-Based Simulation

• David Scerri
• Sarah Hickmott
• Fabio Zambetta
• Ferdinand Gouw
• Isaac Yehuda
• Lin Padgham

Bushfire BLOCKS is a modular, distributed, agent-basedsimulation for exploring and informing bushfire responsestrategies. Separate independent modules capture the firespread, evacuation of traffic and human behaviour such asthe decision whether to remain at property. These moduleshave been developed largely independently, using paradigmsand data models appropriate to their individual purpose. Modules are integrated into a single global simulationvia central services for managing time advancement andaccess to shared variables. Execution is distributed, withmodules running on different machines, whilst a custominterface enables viewing and control from one screen. Theunderlying architecture of this system facilitates extensionof individual modules and addition of new modules, withlimited alteration to other modules.

IJCAI Conference 2007 Conference Paper

• Sarah Hickmott
• Jussi Rintanen
• Sylvie Thi
• eacute; baux
• Lang White

The factored state representation and concurrency semantics of Petri nets are closely related to those of concurrent planning domains, yet planning and Petri net analysis have developed independently, with minimal and usually unconvincing attempts at cross-fertilisation. In this paper, we investigate and exploit the relationship between the two areas, focusing on Petri net unfolding, which is an attractive reachability analysis method as it naturally enables the recognition and separate resolution of independent subproblems. On the one hand, based on unfolding, we develop a new forward search method for cost-optimal partial-order planning which can be exponentially more efficient than state space search. On the other hand, inspired by well-known planning heuristics, we investigate the automatic generation of heuristics to guide unfolding, resulting in a more efficient, directed reachability analysis tool for Petri nets.