SymAware: A Software Development Framework for Trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems with Situational Awareness

TL;DR

SymAware is a new software framework that simplifies the development of trustworthy multi-agent systems by providing tools for situational awareness computation, communication, and efficient simulation, validated through multiple case studies.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, efficient framework for multi-agent simulation that integrates situational awareness, control interfaces, and high-performance simulation components.

Findings

Effective in three multi-agent case studies

Enhances simulation efficiency and ease of development

Facilitates trustworthy multi-agent system design

Abstract

Developing trustworthy multi-agent systems for practical applications is challenging due to the complicated communication of situational awareness (SA) among agents. This paper showcases a novel efficient and easy-to-use software framework for multi-agent simulation, named SymAware which provides a rich set of predefined data structures to compute, store, and communicate SA for agents. It also provides an abstract interface for the agents to compute their control inputs taking into account the awareness of the situation, knowledge, and risk of surrounding agents. Besides, utilizing a cluster of specialized components, SymAware hides the heavy computation of physical rendering and communication interfacing of simulation engines behind the control threads, resulting in high implementation efficiency in bridging the gap between conceptual prototyping and practical applications. Three multi-agent case studies are used to validate the efficacy and efficiency of this software framework.