The Eclipse Agent Modeling Platform: The Right Space a the Right time

Miles Parker

Metaascape, LLC.

TITLE: The Eclipse Agent Modeling Platform: The Right Space at the Right Time

ABSTRACT: Many members of the ABM community have long recognized a need for a shared software infrastructure and toolsets that accommodate many diverse approaches to modeling, from hard-core programming to Dynamic Visual models, all in the context of a shared vision and ecosystem. And actually, isn't that really the original Swarm vision in a nutshell? It would be nice if it had all of the goodies we expect, like 3D visualization, some nice built-in models, support for parameter execution and user workspace configurability -- as well as some we don't expect such as support for Test-Driven Model Development, the ability to design a model from scratch in minutes (really!) rather than hours or days and support for web deployment and even modeling. All of those things are not coincidently the target for the Eclipse AMP project. We introduced AMP last year at Swarmfest -- a lot of it has been developed from scratch, but it is in part an evolution of MetaABM, which was partially based on Repast S, followed key ideas from Ascape, all of which are inspired by Swarm. So how has the effort been going so far?

Well, actually, we're pretty much there. The work on AMP in the last year has focussed on taking a promising idea and solid core that supported a number of important use cases and turning it into a polished end-user focussed tool that supports a much broader set of cases. Many of these changes are based on user feedback, and include more intuitive model behavior design tools, significant new model design features that erase previous self-imposed constraints, advanced 3D visualization, roughly 200 pages of end-user documentation, tutorials and look and feel enhancements. Rather than tell you about all of that I'll try to avoid the urge to present a bunch of slides and simply show you what you can do with the tool now. I'll also show some just introduced AMP-based tools from Metascape that support powerful visual model design and exploration and then.. one more thing. (No, it's not AMP running on an iPad, sorry.)

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