Swarm-like development environments

[P Torrens]

Hi there:

This is *slightly* off topic, although the discussion stemming from the
original post regarding the merits of RePast versus Swarm seems to have
forked.

There are now more than a small few environments in the public
domain for developing multi-agent models. Paul Johnson mentioned Ascape in
his earlier post, Christopher Mackie brought up he StarLogo family, and
Jan Burse wrote about Quicksilver. I have some brief details about various
environments for social science simulation at
http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/geosimulation/abms.htm, with links to the
respective project pages. Readers may find it informative.

Paul Johnson brought up the issue of comfort with programming languages as
a first consideration when choosing a development environment, and I think
this is an important point. It also depends on what you are planning on
building. I am working with geoographical simulations, so to me the most
important feature is that as wide a variety of spatial structures can be
encoded into the model as possible. For others, there are likely to be
a number of further considerations. And, looking beyond social
science, there are endless varieties of "intelligent agents" development
environments too play around with.

It's also worth mentioning Swarm and RePast have various extension
environments designed to take the headache out of model building. The
Revolver package for RePast (you can get it at the  RePast site on
Sourceforge; links on my page at the URL above) is one  example: a WYSIWIG
drag-and-drop utility for getting the nuts-and-bolts  of a model together.
There are a few more listed on my pages.

Best Wishes,

Paul T


____________________________________

Paul M Torrens
Research Fellow
Department of Geography and
Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis
University College London
1-19 Torrington Place
London WC1E 6BT
UK

http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk
http://www.geosimulation.com
____________________________________



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