MASON: A Multiagent Simulation Environment

  • Authors:
  • Sean Luke;Claudio Cioffi-Revilla;Liviu Panait;Keith Sullivan;Gabriel Balan

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-;Department of Computer Science and Center for Social Complexity, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax VA 22030, USA

  • Venue:
  • Simulation
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

MASON is a fast, easily extensible, discrete-event multi-agent simulation toolkit in Java, designed to serve as the basis for a wide range of multi-agent simulation tasks ranging from swarm robotics to machine learning to social complexity environments. MASON carefully delineates between model and visualization, allowing models to be dynamically detached from or attached to visualizers, and to change platforms mid-run. This paper describes the MASON system, its motivation, and its basic architectural design. It then compares MASON to related multi-agent libraries in the public domain, and discusses six applications of the system built over the past year which suggest its breadth of utility.