The who, What, Where, When, Why, and How of Agents
This book addresses the who, what, where, when, why, and wow of agents
Who needs agents? Who should know about agent modeling? Who should do agent modeling? Who should use the information generated by agent-based models? Understanding the audience for agent-based modeling as a technique and as an information-creating enterprise is the key to its successful use.
What are agents? What do agents allow us to do that cannot be done using standard modeling approaches? The agents modeling approach represents a natural view of how people think about and understand systems that before now has been barely tapped.
Where agents? Where ate the promising applications of ABMS in the everyday business problems that surround us? The growing preponderance of candidate areas for agent-based models means that there is no need to look far for promising applications.
When agents? When it is appropriate to use agent-based modeling and simulation? The situations in which agent-based modeling can offer distinct advantages to more traditional modeling approaches, reveal new insights, and answer long-standing questions are becoming better understood every day.
Why agents? Why do people use agent-based modeling? Agent-based modeling offers the agent focus and perspective as its central concepts and natural starting point. There is a natural evolution in the understanding of agent behaviors and the behaviors of a system as a whole. The authors believe that in the future virtually all computer simulations will be agent-based because of the naturalness of the agent representation and close similarity of agent models to the predominant computational paradigm of object-oriented programming.
How agents? How should one think about agents? How should one go about building agent-based models? Experience is quickly accumulating on the steps that one goes through to be successful at building an agent=based model.
This book provides the answers to these critically important questions for anyone who has heard about agent-based modeling or for those who are considering an agent-based modeling enterprise.
