[Swarm-Support] Asynchronous schedule

[dgokaydin]

Hello everyone,

I'm trying to build a Swarm (java version) model with timesteps dependant
on the state of things at different times. Basically i want to draw the
time to the next event from an exponential distribution, choose my event,
and then schedule it. This is what I've done in a mean field simulation in
fortran but I'm not quite sure that this can be done for multiple
individuals. I suppose so but I don't know exactly how.

I suppose each individual should have a method that, when called, inserts
the time to the next event in the schedule, and at that time, the method
gets called againd to determine the time to the next event. But then...
how to schedule a message for that agent only? I suppose it has something
to do with indexes but I also don't know how to use those. Not a lot of
information around for Java too... Maybe I sould have gone for objective C
but everyone kept telling me that it wasn't used anymore, Java was
everywhere, blah blah blah...

I'm new to programming and Swarm altogether, and I've spent the last month
struggling until I finally got something close to what I wanted working. I
hope I haven't reached a dead-end after all that I had to learn this past
month just to get one lousy algorithm working! :-)

Anyway Swarm looks cool even if just for fun, and there seems to be a lot
of enthusiasts of ABM, but right now I needed a serious algorithm for
serious work. Hope someone can/will help me... A future Swarm citation in
a scientific paper could be in hand if I get this done! ;-)

Dinis Gökaydin

Theoretical Epidemiology Group - IGC (www.igc.gulbenkian.pt/sites/ggomes)

Oeiras - Portugal