Enhancing Self-organising Emergent Systems Design with Simulation

Nowadays, challenge is to design complex systems that evolve in changing environments. Multi-agent systems (MAS) are an answer to implement them and many agent-oriented methodologies are proposed to guide designers. Self-organisation is a promising paradigm to make these systems adaptive: the collective function arises from the local interactions and the system design becomes thus bottom-up. The difficulty rests then in finding the right behaviours at the agent-level to make the adequate global function emerge. The aim of this paper is to show how simulation can help designers to find these correct behaviours during the design stage: by simulating a simplified system and observing it during execution, a designer can modify and improve the behaviour of agents. A model of cooperative agents was implemented under the SeSAm platform in order to be integrated into ADELFE, an agent-oriented methodology dedicated to adaptive MAS (AMAS). This model is described here and applied to show how the behaviour of a simple ecosystem can be improved.