Friday, December 07, 2007

Recent Developments in Toolkits

Many Agent-based modelling toolkits are continuously being developed and reviews quickly go out of date (see Nikolai and Madey for a recent review). Some recent developments can be seen in Repast, StarLogo and NetLogo toolkits, including the support of 3D environments. Repast Simphony 1.0 has recently been released which includes a point and click interface for model development and full GIS support. Additionally StarLogo has created an open source version of StarLogo called OpenStarLogo. Furthermore it has released StarLogo TNG (see image below) which has a simple user interface which allows users with little or no programming experience to create models. NetLogo also supports 3D models (see below).


Repast Simphony 1.0 - Runtime displays showing 2D and 3D visualization of networks.


StarLogo TNG Hill-Climbers example. Highlighting the user interface to create models (E.g. Block Factory and Block Canvas) and the 3D viewer.

Netlogo Traffic Grid 3D Viewer

Allows one to “control traffic lights and overall variables, such as the speed limit and the number of cars, in a real-time traffic simulation (NetLogo)." Thus allowing one to explore traffic dynamics.