MADS (Multi-Agent Diffusion Simulation) Framework
MADS is an agent based framework designed towards implementing innovation diffusion related simulation. Besides being close to the theory, the framework intends to streamline the simulation creation process by providing an efficient means of attaining simple, maintainable and readable software, easy code management, publishing and reuse. This is a very important asset, since this kind of work is usually done in teams and each simulation makes use of large amounts of data and forecasts.
MADS targets a wide range of researchers, as besides the problem of simulating the diffusion of emergent technologies, like fuel cell vehicles or cogeneration systems, for which MADS was originally designed, the study of the diffusion of new products and technologies is very important both for marketing and socio-economic analysis. The most important advantages of using such framework are:
- writing simulations is much easier and intuitive at a high abstraction level (in terms of consumers, suppliers, products and so on) than it would be in terms of objects and vectors
- the structure of the framework imposes a structure on the simulation design thus organizing the creating process
- having the same underlying framework, researchers can combine and share simulation parts
- the distributed model/data management system cuts back on the lengthy data acquisition process by enabling easy sharing
Together with MADS, we provide the SAGS (Service Agent Server) Personal Agent Server . This expanding collection of service agents provides a set of simulation parts ranging from energy price forecasts to the evolution of vehicle characteristic. We strongly encourage users to share their agents so that they can be included in future releases for everyones benefit.
