Abstract:

A naive implementation of a complex system simulation with its plethora of interacting agents would be to represent those interactions as direct communications between the agents themselves. Considerations of the real world that a complex system inhabits shows that agent interactions are actually mediated by the environment within which they are embedded and which embodies facilities used by the agents. This suggests an "environment oriented" simulation architecture. Here we motivate and describe an abstract software architecture for an environment oriented approach to complex systems simulation, and sketch the implementation of this architecture in a number of different ways.