@Article{muscalagiu08a,
  author =	 {Ionel Muscalagiu and Jos\'{e} M. Vidal and Vladimir
                  Cretu and Horia Emil Popa and Manuela Panoiu},
  title =	 {Experimental Analysis of the Effects of Agent
                  Synchronization in Asynchronous Search Algorithms},
  journal =	 {International Journal of Software Engineering and
                  Knowledge Engineering},
  year =	 2008,
  volume =	 18,
  number =	 5,
  pages =	 {619--636},
  abstract =	 {The asynchronous searching techniques are
                  characterized by the fact that each agent
                  instantiates its variables in a concurrent
                  way. Then, it sends the values of its variables to
                  other agents directly connected to it by using
                  messages. These asynchronous techniques have
                  different behaviors in the case of delays in sending
                  messages. This article presents the opportunity for
                  synchronizing the execution of agents in the case of
                  asynchronous techniques. It investigates and
                  compares the behaviors of several asynchronous
                  techniques in two cases: agents process the received
                  messages asynchronously (the real situation) and the
                  synchronous case, when a synchronization of the
                  execution of agents is done, i.e. the agents perform
                  a computing cycle in which they process a message
                  from a message queue. After that, the
                  synchronization is done by waiting for the other
                  agents to finalize the processing of their
                  messages. The experiments show that the
                  synchronization of the agents execution leads to
                  lower costs in searching for solutions. A solution
                  for synchronizing the agents execution is suggested
                  for the analyzed asynchronous techniques.},
  doi = 	 {10.1142/S0218194008003799}
}