Swarm Development Group

The Swarm Development Group an American non-profit organization to advance the development of complex adaptive system-oriented agent-based modeling (ABM) tools initiated at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. It was formed in 1999 by a group of multidisciplinary scientists, researchers, and software developers, led by Chris Langton. Langton was also the founder of the emerging field of research called artificial life.

Overview

Early development work on Swarm was completed by Chris Langton (SFI), Roger Burkhart (John Deere), Nelson Minar (SFI), Manor Askenazi (SFI), Glen Ropella (SFI), Marcus Daniels (SFI), and Alex Lancaster (SFI). Since that time, many hundreds of people around the world have contributed to the continued open source development of the suite of Swarm ABM tools.

The Swarm Simulation System, or Swarn [ [http://www.swarm.org/wiki/Swarm_main_page Swarm] ] as the organization's suite of open-source software tools are called, serves as a platform for agent-based modeling. Swarm is available for free [ [http://www.swarm.org/wiki/Swarm:_software_main_page download Software main page downloads] ] and use, covered by the GNU General Public License. [ [http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html GNU General Public License] ]

The Swarm Development Group holds an annual conference, Swarmfest [ [http://www.swarm.org/wiki/Swarm:_SwarmFest SwarmFest] ] during May, June, or July each summer – typically hosted by a different research university each year. Developers, users, and researchers gather to present research papers and discuss the state of Swarm and other agent-based modeling platforms like RePast (University of Chicago) and Ascape [ [http://www.brookings.edu/es/dynamics/models/ascape/ Ascape] ] (Brookings).

SwarmFest 2007 was held at DePaul University's School of Computer Science, Telecommunications, and Information Systems [ [http://cs.depaul.edu/news/default.asp School of Computer Science, Telecommunications, and Information Systems] ] , in downtown Chicago, Illinois. A wide-range of academic, corporate, and government organizations are represented at SwarmFest.

SwarmFest 2008 was held at Northwestern Memorial Hospital/Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, in downtown Chicago, Illinois. Swarmfest 2008 had special focus areas on agent based modeling in Systems Biology, and the implementation of agent based models in high-performance computing environments.

Applications

Scientific applications

The inter-connected, adaptive complexities found in the natural world provide living laboratories for scientists to explore and comprehend endless facets that comprise the whole of reality. Agent-based modeling seeks to replicate these complexities and adaptations in computational environments where these interactive emergent behaviors can be analyzed multi-dimensionally. By defining and assigning agencies reflective of prescribed behaviors, known or estimated, to active software agents in a computer simulation, scientists can approximate experimental results not possible in natural temporal frameworks.

Swarm and other agent-based modeling platforms afford scientists the opportunity to conduct and visualize experiments in these synthetic macro and microenvironments for testing scientific theories, natural data sets, and other analyses while free of pressing constraints like time, volume, hazards, or many other parameters.

Commercial applications

Agent-based models have been used since the mid-1990s to solve a variety of business and technology problems. Examples of applications include:
* supply chain optimization and logistics;
* modeling of consumer behavior, including word of mouth and social network effects; * distributed computing;
* workforce management;
* traffic management; and
* portfolio management. In these and other applications, the system of interest is simulated by capturing the behavior of individual agents and their interconnections. Agent-based modeling tools can be used to test how changes in individual behaviors will affect the overall, emergent system behavior. (This section is copied from Wikipedia: Agent-based model):

See also

* Swarm (simulation)

References

External links

* [http://www.swarm.org Swarm Development Group]