Actors based agent modelling and simulation

Abstract

Agent-based modeling and simulation are some powerful techniques that are widely used with success for analyzing complex and emergent phenomena in many research and application areas. Many different reasons are behind the success of such techniques, among which an important mention goes to the availability of a great variety of software tools, that ease the development of models, as well as the execution of simulations and the analysis of results. However, the agent models provided by such tools do not offer the features of the computational agents found in multi-agent systems or distributed artificial intelligence techniques. Therefore, it is difficult to use such tools to model complex systems defined by autonomous, proactive and social entities. This paper presents an actor software library, called ActoDeS, for the development of concurrent and distributed systems, and shows how it can be a suitable mean for building flexible and scalable ABMS applications.