About

The GAMA Platform is agent-based modeling software that was originally (2007-2010) developed by the Vietnamese-French research team MSI (located at IFI, Hanoi, and part of the IRD - SU International Research Unit UMMISCO). It is now developed by an international consortium of academic and industrial partners led b
UMMISCO
, including INRAE, the University of Toulouse 1, the

University of Rouen The University of Rouen Normandy (''Université de Rouen Normandie'') is a French university, in the Academy of Rouen. History and demographics Located not in Rouen, but in the suburb of Mont-Saint-Aignan (a "township" in the Normandy region), th ...

, the University of Orsay, the University of Can Tho, Vietnam, the National University of Hanoi, EDF R&D, CEA LISC, and

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...

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GAMA was designed to allow domain experts without a programming background to model phenomena from their field of expertise. The GAMA environment enables exploration of

emergent phenomena In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors that emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole. Emergence ...

. It comes with a models library including examples from several domains, such as

economics Economics () is the social science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and intera ...

biology Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...

physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...

chemistry Chemistry is the science, scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a natural science that covers the Chemical element, elements that make up matter to the chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules and ions ...

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...

, and

system dynamics System dynamics (SD) is an approach to understanding the nonlinear behaviour of complex systems over time using stocks, flows, internal feedback loops, table functions and time delays. Overview System dynamics is a methodology and mathematical ...

. The GAMA simulation panel allows exploration by modifying switches, sliders, choosers, inputs, and other user interface elements that the modeler chooses to make available.

Technical foundation

GAMA Platform is

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

, released under a

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

(GPL3). It is written in

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

and runs on the Java virtual machine (JVM). All core components and extensions are written in Java, but end users do not need to work in Java at all if they use a published build of the platform; instead, they would write all models using GAML (described below).

Multiple application domains

GAMA was developed with a very general approach and can be used for many application domains. GAMA is mostly present in applications domains like transport, urban planning, disaster response, epidemiology, analysis of multirobot systems, and the environment, with special emphasis on analyses that use

GIS A geographic information system (GIS) is a type of database containing Geographic data and information, geographic data (that is, descriptions of phenomena for which location is relevant), combined with Geographic information system software, sof ...

data.

High-level Agent-based language

GAML (GAma Modeling Language) is the dedicated language used in GAMA. It is an agent-based language, that provides the possibility to build a model with several paradigms of modeling. This high-level language was inspired by

Smalltalk Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Ka ...

and

, GAMA has been developed to be used by non-computer scientists.

User interface

Modelers may use many visual representations for the same model, in order to highlight a certain aspect of a simulation. These include 2D/3D displays, with basic control of lighting, textures, and cameras. Standard charts such as series plots may also be constructed.

Project examples

The developers maintain a community-sourced list of scientific projects that use GAMA. Some of the larger efforts include: * Hoan Kiem Air: Agent based modeling and simulation of the urban management on traffic and air pollution through tangible interface. * Proxymix: Visualization tool about the influence of spatial configuration on human collaboration. * CityScope Champs-Elysées: An interactive platform to improve decision-making related to the revitalization of the Champs Élysées. * ESCAPE: A Multi-modal Urban Traffic Agent-Based Framework to Study Individual Response to Catastrophic Events. * COMOKIT: Generic model of public policies to contain the spread of COVID-19 epidemics in a city, validated on the basis of different case studies.

Users

Several academic institutions teach modeling and simulation courses based on GAMA. It is taught in the Urban Simulation class at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences, and at the University of Salzburg. It is also used and taught annually at the Multi-platform International Summer School on Agent-Based Modelling & Simulation

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gama Platform Agent-based model Pedagogic integrated development environments Simulation programming languages Agent-based programming languages Java platform Simulation software