Hardware-based agent modelling: event-driven reactive architecture (EDRA)

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have been recognised as a promising solution to address complex problems in many areas. However such systems are extremely hungry in terms of computational resources. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) offer great performance improvement over software implementations in terms of computational resource allocation but applications of multi-agent systems in such hardware have been poorly explored. This paper describes an Event Driven Reactive Architecture (EDRA), which is a novel multi-agent architecture for reconfigurable hardware. The EDRA approach enables the design and implementation of the internal architecture of agents targeted to be deployed in FPGA, based on fine-grained task decomposition to generate reactive structures triggered by signals through consistent hardware interfaces that enable the internal flow of information.