Modelling time passing

[Kevin Crowston]

This might be too obvious a modelling problem, but it's something I'm
running into.  I have several agents (of course) and want to model them
working asynchronously.  I had a parallel version in which the asynchrony
happened automatically, since the agents ran at different speeds and so the
messages they sent each other happened at various times.

What's the natural swarmy way to model this?  I'm starting them from a
schedule and having them schedule future work for themselves and each
other, but the execution of an agent appears to happen in zero time from
the point of view of the schedule, so all the future work is scheduled for
the same point in the future. What I want is for the agent to work, and to
have the schedule to appear to that agent to keep advancing, so that when
future work gets scheduled, it's offset by the time the agent took to run.
I suppose I could just record the time before and after the work and use
that, but it seems clumsy somehow... or maybe I'm just too tired to
appreciate it...

Kevin