Agent-Based modeling and simulation of biological systems

Abstract

Agent-based modeling and simulation is a powerful technique in simulating and exploring phenomena that includes a large set of active components represented by agents. The agents are actors operating in a real system, influencing the simulated environment and influenced by the simulated environment. The agents are included in the simulation model as model components performing actions autonomously and interacting with other agents and the simulated environment to represent behaviors in the real system. In this chapter, we describe how to develop an agent-based model and simulation for biological systems in Repast Simphony platform, which is a Java-based modeling system. Repast Simphony helps developers to create a scenario tree including displays of agents, grid and continuous space, data sets, data loaders, histogram, and time charts. At the end of this chapter, we present case studies developed by our research group with references to demonstrate local behavior of biological system.