Romulo Krafta

The MAS-SOC Approach to Multi-agent Based Simulation

This paper presents the MAS-SOC approach to Multi-Agent Based Simulation. It integrates specific agent technologies for agent programming and communication, and includes a language we have designed for the specification of the environment to be shared by the agents in a simulation. A graphical interface is provided which helps the development of agent simulations (by managing libraries of simulation components and automatically generating appropriate source codes for the associated interpreters). In future improvements of this approach, we aim at including extra features that would favour the development of social simulations in particular, and to further improve the user interface so as to facilitate the access of social scientists to the design and implementation of multi-agent based simulations. In order to assess our platform for agent simulation, a case study on social aspects of the production and occupation of urban spaces is under development; this paper also briefly describes that social simulation and its preliminary results.