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obtained by exploiting the Agent-Based Modeling
and Simulation (ABMS) approach in several
application domains (e.g. financial, economic,
social, logistic, physical science, chemical,
engineering). However, to promote widespread
adoption of the ABMS, well-defined processes,
modeling techniques, and tools which are able to
fully support domain-experts (with often limited
programming expertise) are currently lacking.
In this context, the paper has aimed to extend the
benefits of the emerging software engineering
Model-Driven approach in the ABMS context by
proposing an OMG MDA-based process which
enables ABMS practitioners to obtain platform-
independent agent-based models which are easy to
verify (as they conform to meta-models), modify
and update (as they are mainly constituted by visual
diagrams based on the UML notation) with
significantly reduced programming and
implementation efforts (as the simulation code is
automatically generated from the defined models).
Although there are interesting proposals which
exploit Model-Driven approaches for developing
agent-based conceptual and simulation models, the
proposal differs from all others as it fully complies
with MDA so providing an effective platform
independent approach for ABMS.
Starting from the visual modeling environment
offered by the AMP Eclipse Project, which has
provided the reference framework (AMF) for the
definition of Platform-Independent and Platform-
Specific simulation Models as well as code
generation, an integrated ABMS environment can be
obtained for supporting both the conceptual
modeling of the system (in terms of Computation
Independent Models) and model transformations
enabled by the defined meta-models and related
mapping. Ongoing research efforts are underway
devoted to the definition and extensive
experimentation of a full-fledged ABMS
methodology which, by exploiting the MDA-based
approach, is able to seamlessly guide domain experts
from the analysis of a complex system to its agent-
based modeling and simulation.
REFERENCES
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