Re: Announcing: BreakoutReporter

[Rick Riolo]

Steve,
This sounds really useful, I can't wait to
give it a try.
Thanks!
 - r

-- 
Rick Riolo                           address@hidden
Center for Study of Complex Systems (CSCS)
4477 Randall Lab                
University of Michigan         Ann Arbor MI 48109-1120
Phone: 734 763 3323                  Fax: 734 763 9267
http://www.pscs.umich.edu/PEOPLE/rlr-home.html

On Thu, 21 Feb 2002, M Lang / S Railsback wrote:

> Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 17:26:31 -0700
> From: M Lang / S Railsback <address@hidden>
> Reply-To: address@hidden
> To: Swarm support <address@hidden>
> Subject: Announcing: BreakoutReporter
> 
> The Humboldt State fish modeling crowd is happy to release our latest
> handy Swarm add-on, a tool for collecting data from collections of
> agents. "BreakoutReporter" makes it easy to create and customize output
> files with statistical summaries of agent characteristics, broken out by
> up to five categories. For example, in our fish models we can use it to
> write out, every 10 simulation days, the number and average weight of
> fish broken out by fish species and age.
> 
> The code is in Objective C. Feedback on the value of adding it to Swarm
> would I'm sure be welcome.
> 
> I put the code & documentation on the "Software" page of our web site:
> http://math.humboldt.edu/~simsys/
> 
> Following is the overview from the documentation.
> 
> Steve Railsback
> 
> ***************************************************
> 
> BreakoutReporter is an Objective C class that reports statistics on a
> list of objects in a Swarm model, with the output broken out by up to
> five variables and written to a file. (The model objects are referred to
> here as agents, even though they can be any objects meeting the
> conventions defined below.) For example, an animal model could use the
> BreakoutReporter to periodically write to an output file the number of
> animals and their mean weight, broken out by species, sex, and age.
> Additional output columns can be added to report model variables such as
> the simulation date.
> 
> BreakoutReporter uses a "breakout map"-a structure of five nested Swarm
> maps to sort the objects by the breakout variables. The breakout
> variables are defined during the create phase. One copy of the breakout
> map contains Swarm lists, onto which are sorted the agents when the
> breakoutReporter is updated. Other copies of the breakout map contain
> Swarm averagers, attached to the lists of agents, that calculate the
> output statistics. The averagers can provide the count, total, maximum,
> mimimum, or average (mean) value over the agents.
> 
> A breakoutReporter can be updated during a simulation by either (1)
> adding more agents to the lists for which statistics are reported, or
> (2) replacing all the agents on these lists. For example, the number of
> live animals in a model can be reported using a breakoutReporter updated
> by replacing all the live animal objects (because some that were
> previously alive are now dead); but the cumulative number of dead
> animals can be reported using a breakoutReporter updated by adding the
> newly deceased animal objects (because dead animals stay dead). A new
> output line can be written after each update.
> 
> The output file is in column format so it can easily be imported into a
> spreadsheet or data base. The columns are automatically labeled, and a
> system time stamp is automatically written at the top of the output
> file.
> 
> 


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