Programming agent-based demographic models with cross-state and message-exchange dependencies: A study with speculative PDES and automatic load-sharing

Agent-based modeling and simulation is a versatile and promising methodology to capture complex interactions among entities and their surrounding environment. A great advantage is its ability to model phenomena at a macro scale by exploiting simpler descriptions at a micro level. It has been proven effective in many fields, and it is rapidly becoming a de-facto standard in the study of population dynamics. In this article we study programmability and performance aspects of the last-generation ROOT-Sim speculative PDES environment for multi/many-core shared-memory architectures. ROOT-Sim transparently offers a programming model where interactions can be based on both explicit message passing and in-place state accesses. We introduce programming guidelines for systematic exploitation of these facilities in agent-based simulations, and we study the effects on performance of an innovative load-sharing policy targeting these types of dependencies. An experimental assessment with synthetic and real-world applications is provided, to assess the validity of our proposal

Linked lives: the utility of an agent-based approach to modelling partnership and household formation in the context of social care

The UK’s population is aging, which presents a challenge as older people are the primary users of health and social care services. We present an agent-based model of the basic demographic processes that impinge on the supply of, and demand for, social care: namely mortality, fertility, health-status transitions, internal migration, and the formation and dissolution of partnerships and households. Agent-based modeling is used to capture the idea of “linked lives” and thus to represent hypotheses that are impossible to express in alternative formalisms. Simulation runs suggest that the per-taxpayer cost of state-funded social care could double over the next forty years. A key benefit of the approach is that we can treat the average cost of state-funded care as an outcome variable, and examine the projected effect of different sets of assumptions about the relevant social processes

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Data-driven modelling of biological multi-scale processes

Biological processes involve a variety of spatial and temporal scales. A holistic understanding of many biological processes therefore requires multi-scale models which capture the relevant properties on all these scales. In this manuscript we review mathematical modelling approaches used to describe the individual spatial scales and how they are integrated into holistic models. We discuss the relation between spatial and temporal scales and the implication of that on multi-scale modelling. Based upon this overview over state-of-the-art modelling approaches, we formulate key challenges in mathematical and computational modelling of biological multi-scale and multi-physics processes. In particular, we considered the availability of analysis tools for multi-scale models and model-based multi-scale data integration. We provide a compact review of methods for model-based data integration and model-based hypothesis testing. Furthermore, novel approaches and recent trends are discussed, including computation time reduction using reduced order and surrogate models, which contribute to the solution of inference problems. We conclude the manuscript by providing a few ideas for the development of tailored multi-scale inference methods.Comment: This manuscript will appear in the Journal of Coupled Systems and Multiscale Dynamics (American Scientific Publishers