Tools of the Trade: A Survey of Various Agent Based Modeling Platforms

Agent Based Modeling (ABM) toolkits are as diverse as the community of people who use them. With so many toolkits available, the choice of which one is best suited for a project is left to word of mouth, past experiences in using particular toolkits and toolkit publicity. This is especially troublesome for projects that require specialization. Rather than using toolkits that are the most publicized but are designed for general projects, using this paper, one will be able to choose a toolkit that already exists and that may be built especially for one's particular domain and specialized needs. In this paper, we examine the entire continuum of agent based toolkits. We characterize each based on 5 important characteristics users consider when choosing a toolkit, and then we categorize the characteristics into user-friendly taxonomies that aid in rapid indexing and easy reference.Agent Based Modeling, Individual Based Model, Multi Agent Systems

Expanding the Use of Cellular Automata

Cellular automata are a type of simulation based upon dividing space into cells. More specifically, cellular automata are characterized by parallelism, locality, and homogeneity. A simulation is run by conducting a series of updates, consisting of running a set of rules that all cells follow. The rules typically consist of looking at a cell\u27s immediate neighbors and/or itself to determine what will be in the cell at the next step. The rules are applied to all the cells at exactly the same time in exactly the same manner. The use of cellular automata has been limited to computer scientists, those who can write code, and people who understand the traditional nomenclature. Physicists, mathematicians, or even those who are just interested in different types of simulations should be able to fully explore the full potential of cellular automata. In order to expand the use of cellular automata to additional fields, my research has led to the creation of a program that allows users to easily create cellular automata without having to have foreknowledge of cellular automata terminology. The user is taken through a series of steps where they can control the size of the system, the number and speed of iterations, define the system variables in their own terms, populate the system however they wish, and make their own rules. The program also allows extreme flexibility so that non-traditional simulations can potentially be explored

Agent based predictive models in archaeology

For over 40 years archaeologists have been using predictive modelling to locate archaeological sites. While great strides have been made in the theory and methods of site predictive modelling there are still unresolved issues like a lack of theory, poor data, biased datasets and poor accuracy and precision in the models. This thesis attempts to address the problems of poor model performance and lack of theory driven models through the development of a new method for predictive modelling, agent based modelling. Applying GIS and agent based modelling tools to a project area in southeaster New Mexico this new methodology explored possible behaviours that resulted in site formation such as access to water resources, travel routes and resource exploitation. The results in regards to improved accuracy over traditional methods were inconclusive as a data error was found in the previously created predictive models for the area that were to be used as a comparison. But, the project was more successful in providing explanatory reasons for site placement based on the models created. This work has the potential to open up predictive modelling to wider archaeology audiences, such as those based at universities. Additional findings also impacted other areas of archaeological investigation outside of predictive modelling, such as least cost path analyses and resource gathering analyses

JCASim - a Java system for simulating cellular automata

. The program system JCASim is a general-purpose system for simulating cellular automata in Java. It includes a stand-alone application and an applet for web presentations. The cellular automata can be specified in Java, in CDL, or using an interactive dialogue. The system supports many different lattice geometries (1-D, 2-D square, hexagonal, triangular, 3-D), neighborhoods, boundary conditions, and can display the cells using colors, text, or icons. We show several examples to demonstrate the wide applicability of the simulation system. 1 Introduction The concept of cellular automata is about fifty years old. In this period of time, a large number of people have written programs to simulate cellular automata (CA). Most of these programs were written to simulate one specific CA, but a significant number of simulation systems have been created for the simulation of "any" cellular automaton. An overview is given in [9]. Two systems we would like to single out developed around speciall..