Tools for Designing & Modeling Complex Systems [closed]

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What are so开发者_如何学Cme good tools for designing & modeling complex systems?

I'll leave the question open to some interpretation, to allow for a variety of answers.

Complex System: A complex system is a system composed of interconnected parts that as a whole exhibit one or more properties (behavior among the possible properties) not obvious from the properties of the individual parts. - [Wikipedia - Complex Systems]

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If NetLogo alone does not meet your needs, look at the available extensions.

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Unless you are fluent in writing discrete-event simulation code, or you have a particular subject-matter area for which there exists domain-specific simulation libraries, i would strongly suggest NetLogo.

NetLogo is a platform for Agent-based simulation; the term also describes the DSL used in this platform. Aside from the documentation supplied in NetLogo itself, Seth Tisue and Uri Wilensky have written an excellent introduction to NetLogo.

NetLogo is widely used among the community of Agent-Based modelers--for instance, it was featured in a 2010 Conference Proceedings paper titled Software Tools for Analysis and Modelling in Complex Systems. (The link to the paper is here--careful it's a direct link to the pdf file).

Over the past decade, NetLogo has been used in a large variety of practical applications, including Financial Markets, Clinical Medicine, Network Architecture and Diagnostics, and Traffic Simulation.

A few facts about NetLogo:

• a GUI-driven integrated simulation environment

• free and open source

• stable and mature (development began in 1999)

• actively supported (by Northwestern University, for coursework use)

• excellent and large body of documentation

• many working code examples (complete models) are bundled with the base install of NetLogo

To me, the last bullet was the most compelling reason to try NetLogo--this large and diverse library of pre-built, complete simulations meant a relatively painless learning path. In addition, these served as a valuable library of template models from which i could select a few and modify rather than starting from a blank page.

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You can also consider Wolfram Mathematica or System Modeler. Not only does Mathematica have a very nice cellular automata modeling capability built-in, but there is also a large body of Demonstrations that will help you as you try to build agent-based or cellular automata modeling. In addition, Mathematica can also model dynamical networks. Finally, here is a website listing how Mathematica has been used to model complexity in conference proceedings and other applications.