Swarm is the name of an open-source
agent-based modeling simulation package, useful for simulating the interaction of
agent
Agent may refer to:
Espionage, investigation, and law
*, spies or intelligence officers
* Law of agency, laws involving a person authorized to act on behalf of another
** Agent of record, a person with a contractual agreement with an insuranc ...
s (social or biological) and their
emergent collective behaviour. Swarm was initially developed at the
Santa Fe Institute
The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, inclu ...
in the mid-1990s, and since 1999 has been maintained by the non-profit
Swarm Development Group. Also known as the Swarm Simulation System, it is available for free and use, covered by the
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 to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...
.
GNU General Public License
/ref>
Early development work on Swarm was completed by Chris Langton (SFI), Roger Burkhart (John Deere), Nelson Minar (SFI), Manor Askenazi (SFI), Glen Ropella (SFI), Marcus Daniels (SFI), and Alex Lancaster (SFI). Since that time, many hundreds of people around the world have contributed to the continued open source development of the suite of Swarm ABM tools.
Applications
Scientific applications
Agent-based modeling seeks to replicate these complexities and adaptations in computational environments where these interactive emergent behavior
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 ...
s can be analyzed multi-dimensionally. By defining and assigning agencies reflective of prescribed behaviors, known or estimated, to active software agents in a computer simulation, scientists can approximate experimental results not possible in natural temporal frameworks.
Swarm and other agent-based modeling platforms afford scientists the opportunity to conduct and visualize experiments in these synthetic macro and microenvironments for testing scientific theories, natural data sets, and other analyses while free of pressing constraints like time, volume, hazards, or many other parameters.
Commercial applications
Agent-based models have been used since the mid-1990s to solve a variety of business and technology problems. Examples of applications include:
* supply chain optimization
Supply-chain optimization (SCO) aims to ensure the optimal operation of a manufacturing and distribution of supply chain. This includes the optimal placement of inventory within the supply chain, minimizing operating costs including manufacturin ...
and logistics
Logistics is generally the detailed organization and implementation of a complex operation. In a general business sense, logistics manages the flow of goods between the point of origin and the point of consumption to meet the requirements of ...
;
* modeling of consumer behavior, including word of mouth
Word of mouth, or ''viva voce'', is the passing of information from person to person using oral communication, which could be as simple as telling someone the time of day. Storytelling is a common form of word-of-mouth communication where one pe ...
and social network
A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for ...
effects;
* distributed computing
A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...
;
* workforce management Workforce management (WFM) is an institutional process that maximizes performance levels and competency for an organization. The process includes all the activities needed to maintain a productive workforce, such as field service management, human ...
;
* traffic management
Traffic management is a key branch within logistics. It concerns the planning control and purchasing of transport services needed to physically move vehicles (for example aircraft, road vehicles, rolling stock and watercraft) and freight.
Traffi ...
; and
* portfolio management.
In these and other applications, the system of interest is simulated by capturing the behavior of individual agents and their interconnections. Agent-based modeling tools can be used to test how changes in individual behaviors will affect the overall, emergent system behavior.
See also
* Agent-based social simulation
* Repast
*NetLogo
NetLogo is a programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) for agent-based modeling.
About
NetLogo was designed by Uri Wilensky, in the spirit of the programming language Logo, to be "low threshold and no ceiling". It teache ...
* Sugarscape
GAMA
References
External links
Swarm Homepage
{{collective animal behaviour
Agent-based software
Scientific simulation software
Emergence