An approach to agent-based modeling with Modelica

Modelica is a free, general-purpose object-oriented equation-based modeling language. It is mainly designed to describe systems using the physical modeling approach. Our proposal to describe Agent-Based Models (ABMs) in Modelica is discussed in this manuscript. The contribution of the presented work is twofold: firstly, to analyze the conceptual requirements to describe ABMs in Modelica; and secondly, to develop a prototype implementation following the previous analysis. Agents are described using a message passing communication mechanism previously proposed by the authors. Additional extensions to this mechanism are proposed in order to describe agent interactions. The environment, where the agents live, is described as a two-dimensional cellular automaton. A new Modelica library, named ABMLib, developed to support this functionality, is presented. A prototype implementation of the message passing mechanism and ABMLib models has been performed to demonstrate the functionality of the library as a proof-of-concept for this proposal. The library is freely available at www.euclides.dia.uned.es/vsanz.