Orthogonal agents in modeling and simulation

We consider a class of agent-based systems of autonomous self-governed agents with purpose-specific behavior. Agents of this class contribute most to the overall performance if they have an unobstructed (transparent) access to the environment. Many examples of such systems can be found in swarm technologies and asynchronous simulation of discrete and continuous systems. A distance function for a multi-agent system operating within a given environment is proposed as a dot product of the system's characteristic time-vectors. It is shown that the smaller the scalar product between a time vector of resources demand and a time vector of resources availability the better the efficiency of the agent's actions. In some cases, the better efficiency of individual agents translates into improvement of the overall performance of the system. This observation is postulated as principle of orthogonality. Most well studied examples include discrete-continuous physical, financial, control and other multi-agent models. Some experimental results are presented. More general observations are made in the context of natural decomposition.