Discrete Event Simulation and Social Science: The XeriScape Artificial Society

摘要

Social scientists use artificial society simulations to explore complex behaviors that result from the interaction of agents. One such artificial society is Epstein and Axtell's Sugarscape simulation. In Sugarscape, agents are born, eat 'sugar', travel, reproduce, and die in a torus-shaped virtual world. Sugarscape uses simple rules to create a virtual society where agent interactions aggregate to form surprisingly complicated social structures. This paper presents XeriScape, a Sugarscape-style artificial society based on the Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS) formalism implementation in the Java language (DEVS-Java). DEVS-Java is a powerful tool that makes XeriScape a more efficient, flexible, and extensible artificial society simulation than Sugarscape. A number of experiments illustrate the capabilities and advantages of the DEVS-Java environment for artificial societies and other social science applications.