AgentScript

AgentScript is a minimalist Agent Based modeling system based on NetLogo semantics.

It has a Model/View/Control (MVC) architecture which cleanly separates the three components.

  • Model: Provides NetLogo-like semantics for Patches, Turtles and Links. It has no colors, shapes, sizes etc for viewing the model.
  • View: Use the Model properties to create a view. There can be many Views. We provide a 2D Canvas view and a Three.js 3D view. There is also GIS support via a gis module, a geojson module, as well as Leaflet based demos. Plot views are also available.
  • Controls: We use dat.gui for a menu UI, a Mouse module for selecting Model objects (Patches, Turtles and Links), an Animator for fine control over the Model/Draw steps.

Modern JavaScript

AgentScript is entirely ES6 Module based with import and export statements.

This allows direct access to individual modules which will automatically load only the module and its dependencies.

Example: to import Class Model for building your own model, use:

import Model from './path/to/agentscript/src/Model.js'

.. where path/to/agentscript is a local file system path or a url to a server:

There are bundles as well of all the agentscript modules as a single file from the usual NPM-based CDNs:

To create your own local agentscript files:

  • Go to: https://github.com/backspaces/agentscript
  • Click on the large green Code button
  • Click on Download ZIP. The creates the file agentscript-master.zip
  • Unzip this. Creates agentscript-master/
  • Rename/Move to where you want it.

Files

Our directory layout is:

The core agentscript directories:

  • models/: simple sample/demo models. All are es6 modules used in onepagers below
  • src/: all the agentscript source code. All are es6 modules
  • docs/ Documentation for all the individual modules used by the programmer

Developer directories:

  • bin/: workflow scripts
  • dist/: the umd and esm bundles with their min.js versions and src/.
  • test/: testing in browser for all models/ using Puppeteer
  • config/: tools for creating "bundles".
    Note that many of these will be removed as es6 modules fully supported by our dependencies. For example models/scripts will be removed when workers can use import statements in all browsers. Safari, we're talking about you!

Run demos

The models directory contains the individual Models JavaScript files. I.e. HelloModel.js exports the HelloModel. It is the only demo directory with .js files, the rest are "onepagers" .html files. Notice the links use "query parameters" that the index.html file uses to run the model. The output is a random sample of the model's results.

models

The views1 onepagers import models from the models/ dir and run for 500 steps, printing out a sample of the model's data.

views1

The views2 onepagers import models from the models/ dir and add a 2D Canvas view.

views2

The views25 onepagers import models from the models/ dir and add a Three.js webgl 3D view.

views25

The views3 onepagers import models from the models/ dir and add a Three.js webgl 3D view.

views3

The views3 onepagers are similar to the views25 onepagers. It differs from views25 in that these use true 3D via src/Model3D.js and src/Turtle3D.js subclasses.

mvc

The mvc onepagers are combine Models, Views, and Controls into "apps".

gis

The gis onepagers use gis & geojson utilities to create and view models running on Leaflet maps with geojson data.

fb

An experimental distributed framework for running models in one page while listening & getting results in another. We call these Model Transforms. They currently show their results in the browser console.

Developer Information

Most users need not worry about this, you can access all the AgentScript code as described above using local files or servers. This is for those wishing to build the AgentScript system itself.

To clone the github repo:

  • cd to where you want the agentscript/ dir to appear.
  • git clone https://github.com/backspaces/agentscript
  • cd agentscript # go to new repo
  • yarn install # install all dev dependencies.
  • yarn build # complete the install.
  • yarn run build-vendor # build depend
    Note: Fine to use npm rather than yarn.

All workflow is npm run scripts. See package.json's scripts, or use yarn/npm run for a list. JavaScript Standard Style is used.

License

Copyright Owen Densmore, RedfishGroup LLC, 2012-2021
AgentScript may be freely distributed under the GPLv3 license:

AgentScript is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program, see LICENSE within the distribution. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.