SDL, a graphical language useful to describe social simulation models

Simulation, and specifically social simulation, is a discipline that usually involves professionals with different formation. This implies that the modeling languages, tools and infrastructures used to model can be diverse. This paper has the main objective of show a graphical language, widely used in the engineering field, which allows a complete graphical and no ambiguous description of a simulation model. The language, named SDL (Specification and Description Language) is defined by the ITU-T (on the Z.100 recommendation). Since SDL is a standard different tools understand the language, allowing a simulation or an automatic code generation from the SDL description of the model. This paper has two main sections, first we describe the rudiments of the language, and second we shown an example of a multiagent system description using SDL language.