Multi Agent Based Simulation: Beyond Social Simulation

Multi Agent Based Simulation (MABS) has been used mostly in purely social contexts. However, compared to other approaches, e.g., traditional discrete event simulation, object-oriented simulation and dynamic micro simulation, MABS has a number of interesting properties which makes it useful also for other domains. For instance, it supports structure preserving modeling of the simulated reality, simulation of pro-active behavior, parallel computations, and very dynamic simulation scenarios. It is argued that MABS is a useful technique for simulating scenarios also in more technical domains. In particular, this hold for the simulation of technical systems that are distributed and involve complex interaction between humans and machines. To illustrate the advantages of MABS, an application concerning the monitoring and control of intelligent buildings is described.