[Swarm-Modelling] Ascape Open Source Release Announcement

[Miles T.Parker]

[You received this one-time message because you are either a  
subscriber to an ABM tools related mailing list or you have  
personally expressed interest in Ascape at some point in the past.  
Let me apologize in advance if this message is unwelcome.]

Friends and Colleagues in the Agent-Based Modeling Community,

I am pleased (if a bit surprised!) to announce that the Ascape agent- 
based modeling framework is now available under an Open Source BSD  
license. I'm grateful to Gordon McDonald, Josh Epstein and Ross  
Hammond at Brookings and Mario Inchiosa, Bipin Chadha, Bud Whitmeyer,  
Ted Grabowski and the rest of the NuTech team for the perseverance in  
seeing this effort past the final hurdles.

"Ascape is an innovative tool for developing and exploring general- 
purpose agent-based models. It is designed to be flexible and  
powerful, but also approachable, easy to use and expressive...Ascape  
models are easier to explore, and profound changes to the models can  
be made with minimal code changes. Ascape offers a broad array of  
modeling and visualization tools...Ascape is written for Java 1.5 and  
runs on any Java-enabled platform."

http://ascape.sourceforge.net/

It is hard to believe that it has been a decade since Ascape was  
first coded. As some of you may remember ;), there have been a number  
of efforts to get modern versions of Ascape publicly released over  
the years. There are of course a number of very good ABM tools  
available and exciting next generation efforts on the horizon. Still,  
I believe that Ascape has something to offer, especially for those  
wishing to explore a set of important and interesting models in their  
original forms, or for those with Java experience looking for a tool  
well suited to defining high-level ABMs and easily subjecting them to  
different modeling assumptions.

[On the subject of next generation tools, a brief mention of the Open  
Source "metaABM" project for those who aren't aware of it... It is an  
independent (e.g. not ANL endorsed) outgrowth of the Simphony "score"  
work and allows model structure and behavior to be designed at a high  
platform-neutral level (graphically and later via DSL) and then  
automatically generated for a specific toolkit, with initial targets  
for Repast Simphony and Ascape. There should be a feature complete  
release in the very near future and  there is open SVN access. Please  
let me know if you would like to be notified of release, or check  
back to the "metascapeabm" website in the coming weeks.]

On a personal note, I am traveling with my family around the US and  
Canada in our Airstream trailer for the next year and I am eager to  
meet with local ABM groups along the way. If you might be interested  
in hosting a talk or workshop or just an informal get together,  
please let me know.

-Miles

Miles T. Parker
metascape, LLC
address@hidden
http://www.metascapeabm.com