SIMOC Agent Model by Kai Staats

Explorers at heart
SIMOC is built by developers who are themselves code innovators and real world explorers. We want for you to explore too, both at your computer and far away from the keyboard, track pad, and internet, to see our home world as though you are setting foot on Mars for the first time.

The SIMOC development team is pleased to provide you with the complete description of all agents employed in the default SIMOC simulations, the currencies of exchange, and the background and research employed in developing these complex interactions. We believe you will find the depth and breadth of our research, documentation, and calculations of value when it comes to your own agent design and revised model validation.

What is an Agent-Based Model?
The definition provided by Wikipedia is “A computational model for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous agents (both individual or collective entities such as organizations or groups) in order to understand the behavior of a system and what governs its outcomes.” That’s pretty good.

SIMOC is built upon a custom ABM developed by the SIMOC team since 2017.

On what science is SIMOC built?
A good platform for research must be built upon a solid science foundation. SIMOC is no exception.

  • The Agents & Currencies document was originally a collection of notes maintained by SIMOC team lead Kai Staats as a means to track resources and references. This grew into a fairly rich resource, now made available to you. (We are in the process of reformatting this document as RST for the sake of simplicity and uniformity—stay tuned!)
  • SIMOC is also built upon a rich, growing array of scientific literature and peer reviewed publications, many of which are listed here.

How do I analyze the resultant simulation data?
Once you have downloaded the simulation data from your preset or custom SIMOC model runs, you can use simple tools such as MS Excel or LibreOffice Calc spreadsheets to plot the data and visually analyze the trends, apply your own Matlab or Python based scripts, or use the Jupyter Notebook built by SIMOC Core Developer Grant Hawkins.

Can I run SIMOC locally?
Yes. There are two ways to run SIMOC locally.

  1. Load SIMOC from the National Geographic server, then save the Preset or Custom simulation data locally. As long as you keep your browser tab open, you can re-load any of past or current datasets from your local cache. This is ideal for providing demonstrations to a class or in a lecture setting, where your investigation is complete you desire instead to share the results without worrying about internet stability or server-side runtime.
  2. Download the entire SIMOC package and install locally.