Agent-Based Modeling with the JABM Toolkit

In many areas of science, agent-based models have become increasingly important. These models are often sufficiently complex that deriving closed-form solutions for quantitative aspects of their macroscopic behaviour is often impractical if not impossible, and hence they are often analysed using discrete-event simulation and Monte-Carlo methods. In this paper we give an overview of agent-based modeling with an emphasis on its application to multi-agent systems research, and show how a software design pattern called “dependency injection” can be used to implement highly configurable simulation models which are able to incorporate various assumptions about agents’ rationality and learning. We then show how these ideas have been implemented in the Java Agent-Based Modelling (JABM) toolkit — an open-source framework for building agent-based models.