Modeling and Simulating a Pervasive Game

For one of my doctoral school course, I plan to make a very basic model and agent-based simulation of CatchBob! (or something similar but with more players) using RePast. RePast allows modeling directly in Java and includes a GIS interface allowing agents to live on maps.

A few background words on computer models and multi-agent simulations:
The goal is to gain insight into the operation of systems. Computer simulations is often used as an adjunct to, or substitution for, modeling systems for which simple closed form analytic solutions are not possible. The common feature of all computer simulation is to attempts to generate a sample of representative scenarios for a model in which a complete enumeration of all possible states of the model would be prohibitive or impossible.

I am interested in discrete event simulation and more specificaly an agent-based simulation. In agent-based simulation, the individual entities in the model are represented directly (rather that by how the agent’s state is updated from one time-step to the next. Agent-based simulation has been effectively used in ecology, where it is often called individual based modeling and has been used in situations for which individual variability in the agents cannot be neglected, such as population dynamics of salmon and trout (most purely mathematical models assume all trout behave identically).

The reliability and the trust people put in computer simulations depends on the validity of the simulation model, therefore verification and validation are of crucial importance in the development of computer simulations. Another important aspect of computer simulation is that of reproducibility of the results (except when humans are part of the simulation).