“Abstract. In this paper we describe a new product written to simplify the construction of Agent based simulations called Visual Swarm Builder. VSB is an integrated environment for the design and realization of simulations using Swarm libraries, based on menu-driven and graphic selections of objects like graphs, ‘standard agents’, etc. This paper is divided into three sections. It commences with an introduction about the need of an instrument like VSB, then there are parts dedicated to the simulation environment, Swarm, and finally there’s the last parts in which there’s described the package, with all the present and future features, and a short example designed with VSB.”
“Between the two extremes of ‘just add water’ and ‘do it yourself’ several options have emerged in the last few years. Swarm, Ascape, Repast, Starlogo, AgentSheets and few other simulation platforms are, as of today, the most credible contenders.”
“the trade-off is between the ease of programming on the one hand, and the sophistication of the obtainable end-product.”
used in economic simulation
pg 153
“Visual Swarm Builder. VSB is an integrated environment for the design and realization of Swarm code based on a menu driven selection of objects like schedule of events, graphics, lists and arrays etc”
“The absolute beginner as well as the expert programmer will find VSB useful. Because of its ease of use the former, and thanks to the speed with which a prototype can be obtained, the latter.”
“The code will first be presented in its Swarm “native” form and then replicated with simple “drag and drop” mouse actions plus very simple editing interventions on the generated source.”
pg 154
“According to original programmers of Swarm, “Swarm is a multi-agent software platform for the simulation of complex adaptive systems. In the Swarm system the basic unit of simulation is the swarm, a collection of agents executing a schedule of actions. Swarm supports hierarchical modeling approaches whereby agents can be composed of swarms of other agents in nested structures. Swarm provides object oriented libraries of reusable components for building models and analyzing, displaying, and controlling experiments on those models. The SWARM tool was
developed at the Santa-Fe Institute with the intention to create a simulation tool for agent-based models. Concerning the people who use these kind of models, which often are not computer scientists, the main goal for the Santa-Fe people was to make an easy-to-use standard application. Chris Langton et al., who developed this tool, claim that SWARM offers the opportunity to focus on the model itself, instead of the implementation issues.”
Key feature of SWARM was its ability to nest systems within systems infinitely. Agents are able to belong to multiple swarms.
SWARM is written in an object-oriented fashion in ObjectiveC and Java.
“Swarm is a useful environment for modelling in fields ranging from political science and economics to ecology and biology;”
pg 155
Swarm allows user to nest the ordering of agent actions.
Graphs and displays can be used to monitor simulation as it is running and user can interact with it by changing the state of the agents.
3 types of objects (classes)
- ModelSwarm creates and control agents
- ObjectSwarm collects info from agents and outputs them to a file or graph
- Classes for different agent types (firms, consumers) and aggreate agents types (markets, industries)
You can modify and extend the simple agent types.
pg 156
“The Swarm project can be viewed as an aid to researchers to create a standard tool to build simulations. But there’s a problem. Programming with Swarm is not easy, the scientist have to spend a few hours (50 hours) to learn the philosophy of the package, how to use the libraries, how to call the graphic routines, how to call data to plot, etc. etc, and how to program in objective-c. ”
Swarm is used to create standard tools. Swarm is not easy to learn.
Visual Swarm Builder was built to help solve this learning curve problem. VSB is a dev environment with prepackaged components to make the development and deployment of simulations based on the Swarm Simulation toolkit easier.
pg 157
“One of the advantages of using visual tools, is that the programmer does not have to write always the same boring code, he may just input a few parameters, and then the Visual tools will fill the other pieces of
code”
VSB runs on MacOsX
pg 158
Source: http://cumincad.architexturez.net/system/files/pdf/1f68.content.07343.pdf