Overview

GAMA is a simulation platform, which aims at providing field experts, modelers, and computer scientists with a complete modeling and simulation development environment for building spatially explicit agent-based simulations. It is being developed by the French-Vietnamese research team MSI (located in IFI, Hanoi, and part of the IRD/UPMC International Research Unit UMMISCO) since 2007.

GAMA provides the modeler with:

• The ability to use arbitrarily complex GIS data as environments for the agents.
• The possibility to run simulations composed of vast numbers of agents (up to millions).
• A way to conduct automated controlled experiments on various scenarios, with a systematic, guided or "intelligent" exploration of the space of parameters of models.
• The possibility to let users interact with the agents in the course of the simulations.

GAMA relies on:

• A modeling language, GAML, for specifying agents and environments
• An extensible library of agents architectures, statistical and spatial analysis functions.
• A cross-platform reproducibility of simulations
• A user interface based on the Eclipse platform, with flexible plotting and graphical views

GAMA is an open-source project hosted on this site. Its latests stable version can be freely downloaded from here (and used without additional requirements on MacOS X, Windows and Ubuntu). It comes pre-loaded with several models, tutorials and a complete on-line documentation.

Spatially explicit agent-based simulations, like the ones that are being developed in GAMA, are at the heart of modern EDSS (Environmental Decision Support Systems) that support deciders and stakeholders in the management of environmental problems (flood control, mitigation of natural catastrophes, land-use and land-planning, plant pests invasions, and so on). Specifically, these simulations allow to couple social, institutional, economical, ecological or biophysical models in a seamless way, and to take into account their influences and interactions on multiple forecasting scenarios.

The MSI team also offers training and courses on agent-based modeling and GAMA (please contact the project owners on this subject).

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