ANN: Java agent tools, request for early testers

[Miles Parker]

As some of you may know, we've been doing inhouse development of agent based 
models in Java. This has resulted in a framework that I'm calling 'ascape'. It 
provides similar functionality to, if not the depth of, the Swarm tools.

We think that it might fill a useful niche in the agent based modeling ecology, 
and we'd like to test that hypothesis. At the moment, the code is feature and 
implementation incomplete, but usable and useful. What we are looking for now 
is a very small sample of users who can use the software - - not so much to 
uncover bugs (although that would be nice!) but to help determine whether it is 
broadly useful and to help evaluate design choices. At that point, assuming 
that interest remains, we'll provide a more general release, which should be of 
the open source, 'free' variety... The ideal early user would have:

1. A good understanding of agent based modeling and/or CAs.

2. Some kind of passing familiarity with Java and Java tools (although anyone 
with Objective C experience should have no problem picking it up, an 
understanding of Java paradigms will be helpful.)

3. Self-sufficeincy and willingness to poke and prod to learn how things work.

4. At this point, interest in modeling farily simple and well confined domains. 
(Heatbugs, sugarscape and the like.)

If you are interested in being an early user/tester of these tools, please send 
me email, giving brief details of your experience and availability. Also, feel 
free to forward this note to anyone who you think might have a strong interest. 
As I said, initial distribution will be extremely limited; we don't have 
support resources, and frankly, I'd like to be able to respond to any obvious 
problems or flaws before a more general release. So there will probably be a 
very quick cut-off. I will respond to everyone, and will let you know when we 
have wider availability.

* * * *

A bit more about the tool:

'Ascape' was developed independently, and it has a number of design features 
and approaches that are unique to it. It is not a port of Swarm into a Java 
environment. It does have a very strong connection to Swarm style modeling, and 
has benefited from Swarm concepts and implementations. For example, it supports 
the idea that all collections of agents can themselves be viewed as agents. At 
the moment, it only supports a small subset of possible implementations.

Design goals are:

a) development effeciency; code for models should be small and descriptive, 
with the framework doing most of the work.
b) modeling flexibility; it should be realtivly easy to change important 
features of models (for example, model a system in 1D, 2D lattice, or graph 
with a single line of code change.)
c) near universal deployment; ability to develop models that can be viewed and 
used on the widest possible variety of platforms, including web browsers. 
(though limited to JDK 1.1.x and higher)
d) peformance; within the improving constraints of Java
e) integration; uses common apis, styles, and methodologies whenever possible.
f) dynamism; provide the ability to modify and (hopefully) create models at 
runtime.

Some current weaknesses:

a) data analysis (although future integration w/ Java tools could be very 
complete)
b) engine features (specifically, action scheduling and the like)
c) general breadth of features
d) control over implementation issues
d) maturity (the api probably won't be frozen for a while.)
e) interfaces with other tools (GIS, etc.., although, again, there are many 
existing or forethcoming Java apis that could be integrated with)
f) performance (probably, although we've been getting pretty decent results so 
far.)
g) documentation (extensive internal/javadoc, but no usage or tutorial)
h) missing features and incomplete implementations of some features

Thanks,

Miles

Miles T. Parker     
Research Programmer
The Brookings Institution
mailto:address@hidden
202-797-6136



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