Re: My project

[cgl]

Xueyue Huang writes:

> > In particular, most of you may already have started to use Swarm in
> > your application, so you may have very good experiences about this
> > language. Could anyone tell me about your opinions about it (is it
> > easy to be mastered?

As Vladimir points out, Swarm is not a *language* itself, but a framework
for doing multi-agent simulations. The language used by Swarm is objective-c
with some library support for doing common simulation type-stuff.

  However, it does look as though Swarm would be a good choice for your
transportation problem. There are other pre-existing transportation
simulation software packages, like Trans-sim from Los Alamos, but I 
don't think they are available to ordinary people - if you could get
ahold of trans-sim, it would probably be ideal for what you
want - it is very special purpose code, and is written in such a
way that you can put in the details of specific cities.

  On the other hand, given the actions that you want travellers to
undergo, you could use swarm in such a way that the travellers 
reason about their day, building up a collection of actions in
a "schedule" - all the travellers submit their schedules to the
scheduling mechanism of their Swarm (could be multi-level swarms
here) and that scheduling mechanism makes sure that these actions
get called on the right travelers and other agents in the system
at the right times. 

  Just to reiterate the point, though, Swarm provides a useful
framework in which you can add Objective-C code to already
existing objects to subclass them to be the kinds of agents
you need for your simulation.

  Again, you should check out the Swarm Web pages at:

        http://www.santafe.edu/projects/swarm/

  especially the links under user-community

  Another modelling platform you might try is StarLogo, available
from the MIT Media Lab...

  I can provide pointers to these software packages if you need them.

Finally - Vladimir suggested that you post this description to

    address@hidden, rather than swarm-support.

You can subscribe to swarm-modelling the same way you did to swarm-support,
via majordomo, and it is the proper list to be discussing modelling issues
in general.

  Sounds like an interesting problem, Xueyue...it would be nice to see 
an instance of this class of problems up and running with Swarm...

  I think you'd get a lot of helpful suggestions from the list if
you allowed us to follow your progress...

  Chris Langton



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