Four Years of Not-Using a Simulator: The Agent-Based Template

Abstract

With steadily increasing performance of computers, agent-based modeling has evolved from an analysis method for qualitative phenomena to strategy for quantitative decision support. With this orientation, however, the modeler faces new challenges during implementation. In particular, an appropriate simulation tool must feature the combination of data and model flexibility, process reproducibility, performance and portability. While existing simulators often do not sufficiently cover these features, it is also not sustainable to generally implement models from scratch. In this work, we want to present the idea of simulation templates as a compromise between the two strategies. We show, on the example of our Agent-Based Template and two use cases, the importance of the described challenges and how the simulation template concept supports solving them. We aim to generally promote the idea of developing a customized template, which, as a layer between simulator and from-the-scratch implementation, combines the advantages of both approaches.