The Missing Link! A new skeleton for evolutionary multi-agent systems in Erlang

Abstract

Evolutionary multi-agent systems (EMAS) play a critical role in many artificial intelligence applications that are in use today. In this paper, we present a new generic skeleton in Erlang for parallel EMAS computations. The skeleton enables us to capture a wide variety of concrete evolutionary computations that can exploit the same underlying parallel implementation. We demonstrate the use of our skeleton on two different evolutionary computing applications: (1) computing the minimum of the Rastrigin function; and (2) solving an urban traffic optimisation problem. We show that we can obtain very good speedups (up to 142.44 ×× the sequential performance) on a variety of different parallel hardware, while requiring very little parallelisation effort.