LDEF Formalism for Agent-Based Model Development

Abstract

As agent-based models (ABMs) are applied to various domains, the efficiency of model development has become an important issue in its applications. The current practice is that many models are developed from scratch, while they could have been built by reusing existing models. Moreover, when models need reconfiguration, they often need to be rebuilt significantly. These problems reduce the development efficiency and ultimately damage the efficacy of ABM. This paper partially resolves the challenges of model reusability from the systems engineering approach. Specifically, we propose a formalism-based ABM development and demonstrate its potential to promote model reuses. Our formalism, named large-scale, dynamic, extensible, and flexible (LDEF) formalism, encourages the building of a larger model by the composition of modularly developed components. Also, LDEF is tailored to the ABM contexts to represent the agent's action procedure and support the dynamic changes of their interactions. This paper shows that LDEF improves the model reusability in ABM development through its practical examples and theoretical discussions