Re: [Swarm-Modelling] newbie question

[alex dinovitser]

Thanks for pointing out newer projects such as JAS and RePast. This however
complicates my task of finding the most suitable tool for my project.

This project is far less ambitious in terms of modelling complex behaviour,
however, it is very important to be able to create a really good animation on
top of a bitmap image of a transport infrastructure (roads, rail, etc), with
agents animated to move on fixed paths from origin to destination, and
interacting with other, stationary agents on departure and arrival.
Has anyone done this using Swarm, RePast, etc???
Which tool would be *most* suitable for this task??

regards,

Alex.





--- "Marcus G. Daniels" <address@hidden> wrote:
> alex dinovitser wrote:
> 
> > My main question regarding SWARM, is; How suitable is it for these 
> > less ambitious applications where there is a small number of simple 
> > agents (entities) and only a few types of agents, each with a fixed 
> > set of attributes that get re-calculated during every interaction, 
> > with results fed to a simple 2D animation as the model runs???
> 
> There are many examples of Swarm being used in that way.   There's a 
> practical cutoff of the number of agents you can do with Swarm -- if you 
> need hundreds of thousands or millions of agents, it's necessary to do 
> an implementation by hand in C or Fortran, or to do something higher 
> level that involves explicit parallelism.   Swarm mainly provides a 
> hierarchical scheduling model that lets you control how concurrency is 
> handled.  But even though Swarm knows about concurrency, as a practical 
> matter there's not it is in a position to do about it (in terms of 
> scalability) because most people don't have fancy NUMA machines (e.g. 
> http://www.sgi.com/servers/altix) that could migrate threads to 
> different processors. Swarm is a basically a fancy multi-level priority 
> queue combined with some instrumentation tools and graphics widgets.
> 
> >In these applications, we are not looking for emergent behaviours, and
> indeed
> >big surprises are rare. We just want to model the real world to try out
> >different operating procedures/ scenarios to calculate such simple
> attributes
> >as cost, contamination, delay time, etc.
> >
> Swarm can certainly do that.



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