DVerse Gym
(Observable Agent Coordination in Distributed Systems: A Comparative Analysis of Architectural Approaches)

Project description

The Digital Communities (DC) programme at Fontys ICT is developing a multi-agent system called DVerse Gym for human and non-human agents to work together in a shared environment. This system serves as a training facility for developing, testing, and monitoring agents.

One project within the DVerse Gym focused on conducting a comparative analysis of different architectural modals to investigate how dynamic agent coordination in multi-agent systems can be made observable.

Context

The project is rooted within the realm of IT technology with a focus on community-centered spaces such as education.

Results

This research investigated three architectural approaches to observable agent coordination: a centralized coordinator design, a decentralized peer-to-peer system, and a hybrid solution which combines centralized task decomposition with distributed execution. The architectures were implemented as proof-of-concept prototypes to examine their structural characteristics, coordination patterns, and observability implications, supported by empirical observations. The centralized approach demonstrated predictable performance and high observability but potential bottlenecks. The decentralized architecture offered better scalability at the cost of increased coordination complexity and limited observability. The hybrid approach achieved a balance between these characteristics by combining centralized control with distributed execution and persistent messaging. The findings suggest that hybrid architectures offer a promising direction for observable agent coordination in distributed systems.