Hardware-based Agent Modelling: Event-Driven Reactive Architecture (EDRA)

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