Here - Agents Lab - University of Nottingham

optimized for this format feature still offers substantially lower encoding timesthan Jade FIPA SL encoding.Time (ms)400036093500319630002717237725002057183120001692164213611466150012791077 991 1091100072478750033062 81 102 126 147 165 20100 20000 40000 60000 80000 100000Number of ObjectsJadex XML Java Serialization Jadex BinaryFig. 9. Performance results using the same data set as Fig. 8 with Jade FIPA SLencoding excludedFigure 9 provides a closer look at the three highest performing formats.While Jadex Binary clearly provides an advantage over Jadex XML by roughlya factor of two, the Java serialization is almost an order of magnitude faster.Initial analysis seems to suggest this is due to the use of the Java ReflectionAPI used by both Jadex XML and Jadex Binary, which the Java serializationmechanism can avoid due to its built-in nature. However, Java serialization hasfurther drawbacks as outlined in Section 3, meaning it is not a general solutionto the problem and has a more narrow scope of environments in which it can beuseful.5.2 CompactnessIn order to test for content compactness, the test object was passed to theencoder and the number of bytes of the encoded object was measured. Since thetest object contained a fair amount of test data, the resulting content sizes wereexpected to be large.As can be seen in Figure 10, the differences between the four formats are quitesubstantial. Jadex XML is barely half the size of the FIPA SL encoding and bothJava serialization and Jadex Binary are substantially smaller still. In fact, JadexBinary clearly provided the most compact representation of the test object,being smaller than even the Java serialization format by a factor of roughly 2.5.112