Optimization of Distributed Systems Using Multi-Agent Systems with Virtual Time

The fusion of Artificial Intelligence and Real-Time areas has proven to be quite a clever movement, similar to the movement associated to check in chess (lets not go that far as checkmate, considering that the area of informatics is quite slippery when it comes to updates). Artificial Intelligence provides new possibilities to the Real-Time systems. However, this approach has shown important difficulties[2]. Mainly, the Real-Time systems have temporal requirements (they usually require predictable response times) that are not usual in Artificial Intelligence techniques. One of the ways to solve this problem is the development of software architectures. These software architectures are used to design intelligent agents that work in real-time environments. These architectures have several mechanisms to allow the agents to work in real time environments offering reactive behavior (to fulfil the temporal requirements) and deliberative behavior [2]. However, in Distributed Systems, although the notion of global time plays an important role, it is hard to realize; at first sight even the definition of the very term itself is not clear at all. This paper is an extended work of [6].