[Swarm-Modelling] Announce: Eclipse Agent Modeling Platform Project (Incubation)

[Miles Parker]

Hi everyone,

The Agent Modeling Platform has been approved as an Eclipse incubation project as part of the Modeling top-level project. Thanks to Ed Merks and Sven Efftinge at Eclipse and Gary An, Lyle Wallis and Daniel Ford and everyone at the Eclipse Foundation for your interest, help and encouragement.

You can read some details here:

http://eclipse.org/proposals/amp

http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/amp/AMPDocuware.pdf

You might notice that there isn't anything else there yet! Its going to take a while to get everything provisioned. The initial code contribution is MetaABM; as well as some as yet unreleased Metascape tools that will provide a basic implementation of the Execution (AXF) and Graphics (AGF) environments. There is a lot of work involved in getting the different AMP components more generalized and all of that converted to the Eclipse standards and namespaces. Please send me any existing MetaABM models that we can use for model conversion testing. We'll post an announcement as soon as there is real code and documentation. In the meantime, check out MetaABM; I am planning to support backward compatibility for acore from existing MetaABM and Simphony score models so you can build MetaABM models for Ascape and Repast now and have a reasonable expectation that they'll run without modification within the AMP environment.

So why am I telling you all this now? The whole point of AMP is to be an open pan-community effort building really extensible tools. AXF / AGF will provide a lot of Eclipse-based (ECL) infrastructure, so in addition to fostering new tools, AMP can benefit existing ABM software projects as well as proprietary tools; in fact this is exactly the kind of thing that AMP is intended to enable. So while there is a technical vision for the core infrastructure, to make this work we really need your input and involvement. This could take any form, from offering ideas and use cases, to integrating with or extending AMP, to project committer status.

Eclipse has two unique technologies that play a key role here. First, Eclipse EMF / Modeling provides the best Model-Driven Software Development platform going. Second, OSGi and the adapter mechanism make it possible for components to easily integrate at runtime without any build-time dependencies on each other. This means that, for example, one developer could provide a high-performance dynamic scheduling engine while another provided a unique visualization tool, and these could be user selectable at runtime. But just as important, the Eclipse community process has been very successful at marrying inclusiveness and transparency with developer-driven design and a mania for quality, and I'm delighted that this project can be a part of all of that.

Discussion: 

news://news.eclipse.org  (If you don't have an account you can create one here: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/createaccount.cgi)

-Miles

Miles Parker

Eclipse AMP Incubation Project Lead

http://metascapeabm.com

http://metaabm.org

http://www.linkedin.com/in/milestparker

http://milesparker.blogspot.com

P.S. The AMP logo might look a little familiar to Swarm folks, its a bit of a homage -- hope that's cool with everyone.