Updates to the MASON

For those who are not on the MASON list-serve, the other day Sean Luke posted a message regarding the a new release (MASON 20) which is part of our NSF CI-EN: Enhancement of a Large-scale Multiagent Simulation Tool project. In this new release (apart from bugfixes) there are some new features. The first is a new distributed parameter sweep package which enables you to run many simulations in parallel with different parameter settings (similar to BehaviorSpace in NetLogo). Next up is an update to GeoMASON, not only are there new demos (as shown below) but changes in the code to enable demos and other applications to be loaded from jar files. The third update is Distributed MASON,  jointly developed with ISISLab at the University of Salerno (it's not D-MASON ). The objective of distributed MASON is to make it possible to port MASON applications to run in cloud computing architectures (more details and example models including distributed HeatBugs, Flockers, and CampusWorld can be seen in Wang et al., 2018). For more details check out the MASON webpage: http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/mason/.

A selection of GeoMason Models included in the new release.

Publications relating to the project:

• Wang, H., Wei, E., Simon, R., Luke, S., Crooks, A.T., Freelan, D. and Spagnuolo, C.  (2018), Scalability in the MASON multi-agent simulation system, in Besada, E., Polo, Ó.R., De Grande, R. and Risco J.L (eds.). Proceedings of the 22nd International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications, Madrid, Spain, pp. 135-144. (pdf)
• Luke, S., Simon, R., Crooks, A.T., Wang, H., Wei, E., Freelan, D., Spagnuolo, C., Scarano, V., Cordasco, G. and Cioffi-Revilla, C. (2018), The MASON Simulation Toolkit: Past, Present, and Future, in Davidsson P. and Verhagen H. (eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Multi-Agent-Based Simulation, Stockholm, Sweden, pp. 75-87. (pdf)