Mobidyc, a generic multi-agents simulator for modeling populations dynamics

Abstract

We present a simulator designed to help scientists who are not experts in computing, such as biologists, to build up, run, and update their models in the field of fish population dynamics. This simulator, written in Smalltalk, is built upon multi-agents concepts and is well suited to model systems where individual or spatial aspects are involved. It provides tools to set the state and the behavior of the agents and to set their environment. The pre-defined components should preferably be used, but help for customizing components or programming new ones is supplied, in order to build more complex agents. The simulator manages qualitative and quantitative variables with simple or composed units, dependencies on parameters, synchronous and asynchronous modes within and between agents, and the importation of ASCII files for the scenario scripts or for the initial stocking of the agents. Four examples of applications are presented.