The Swarm Simulation System: A Toolkit for Building Multi-Agent Simulations

Swarm is a multi-agent software platform for the simulation of complex adaptive systems. In the Swarm system the basic unit of simulation is the “swarm,” a collection of agents executing a schedule of actions. Swarm supports hierarchical modeling approaches whereby agents can be composed of swarms of other agents in nested structures. Swarm provides object-oriented libraries of reusable components for building models and analyzing, displaying, and controlling experiments on those models. Swarm is currently available as a beta version in full, free source code form. It requires the GNU C Compiler, Unix, and X Windows. More information about Swarm can be obtained from our web pages, http://www.santafe.edu/projects/swarm/.