Experiences creating three implementations of the repast agent modeling toolkit

Abstract

Many agent-based modeling and simulation researchers and practitioners have called for varying levels of simulation interoperability ranging from shared software architectures to common agent communications languages. These calls have been at least partially answered by several specifications and technologies. In fact, Tanenbaum [1988] has remarked that the “nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.” Tanenbaum goes on to say that “if you do not like any of them, you can just wait for next year's model.” This article does not seek to introduce next year's model. Rather, the goal is to contribute to the larger simulation community the authors' accumulated experiences from developing several implementations of an agent-based simulation toolkit. As such, this article focuses on the implementation of simulation architectures rather than agent communications languages. It is hoped that ongoing architecture standards efforts will benefit from this new knowledge and use it to produce architecture standards with increased robustness.