HLogo: A Haskell STM-Based Parallel Variant of NetLogo

Abstract

Agent-based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS) has become a quite popular approach among researchers in the community, mainly due to its simplicity, expressiveness and wide applicability. However, in most cases, ABMS tools demonstrate reduced performance, especially when dealing with large experiments. This paper presents HLogo, a parallel variant of the NetLogo ABMS framework, that aims to increase the performance of simulations by utilizing Software Transactional Memory and multi-core CPUs, while maintaining the user friendliness of NetLogo. HLogo is implemented as a Domain Specific Language embedded in the functional language Haskell, which means that it also inherits Haskell’s features, such as strong static typing, a module system and a vast collection of programming libraries.