GAMA (GIS Agent-based Modeling Architecture) is a simulation platform with a complete modelling and simulation integrated development environment (IDE) for writing and experimenting spatially explicit agent-based models. Material was copied from this source, which is available under
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

About

The GAMA Platform is

agent-based model An agent-based model (ABM) is a computational model for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous agents (both individual or collective entities such as organizations or groups) in order to understand the behavior of a system and ...

ing software that was originally (2007-2010) developed by the Vietnamese-French research team MSI (located at IFI, Hanoi, and part of the IRD - SU International Research Unit UMMISCO). It is now developed by an international consortium of academic and industrial partners led b
UMMISCO
, including

INRAE The Institut national de la recherche agronomique (; ; abbr. INRA ) was a French public research institute dedicated to agricultural science. It was founded in 1946 and is a Public Scientific and Technical Research Establishment under the join ...

, the University of Toulouse 1, the

University of Rouen The University of Rouen Normandy (''Université de Rouen Normandie'') is a French university, in the Academy of Rouen. History and demographics Located not in Rouen, but in the suburb of Mont-Saint-Aignan (a "township" in the Normandy region), t ...

, the University of Orsay, the University of Can Tho, Vietnam, the National University of Hanoi, EDF R&D, CEA LISC, and

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fi ...

. Material was copied from this source, which is available under
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
GAMA was designed to allow domain experts without a programming background to model phenomena from their field of expertise. The GAMA environment enables exploration of

emergent phenomena In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when a complex entity has properties or behaviors that its parts do not have on their own, and emerge only when they interact in a wider whole. Emergence plays a central role ...

. It comes with a models library including examples from several domains, such as

economics Economics () is a behavioral science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interac ...

biology Biology is the scientific study of life and living organisms. It is a broad natural science that encompasses a wide range of fields and unifying principles that explain the structure, function, growth, History of life, origin, evolution, and ...

physics Physics is the scientific study of matter, its Elementary particle, fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge whi ...

chemistry Chemistry is the scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a physical science within the natural sciences that studies the chemical elements that make up matter and chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules a ...

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

, and

system dynamics System dynamics (SD) is an approach to understanding the nonlinear behaviour of complex systems over time using stocks, flows, internal feedback loops, table functions and time delays. Overview System dynamics is a methodology and mathematical ...

. The GAMA simulation panel allows exploration by modifying switches, sliders, choosers, inputs, and other user interface elements that the modeler chooses to make available.

Technical foundation

GAMA Platform is

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term encompassing free ...

, released under a

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

(GPL3). It is written in

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

and runs on the

Java virtual machine A Java virtual machine (JVM) is a virtual machine that enables a computer to run Java programs as well as programs written in other languages that are also compiled to Java bytecode. The JVM is detailed by a specification that formally descr ...

(JVM). All core components and extensions are written in Java, but end users do not need to work in Java at all if they use a published build of the platform; instead, they would write all models using GAML (described below).

Multiple application domains

GAMA was developed with a very general approach and can be used for many application domains. GAMA is mostly present in applications domains like transport, urban planning, disaster response, epidemiology, analysis of multirobot systems, and the environment, with special emphasis on analyses that use

GIS A geographic information system (GIS) consists of integrated computer hardware and software that store, manage, analyze, edit, output, and visualize geographic data. Much of this often happens within a spatial database; however, this is not ...

data.

High-level Agent-based language

GAML (GAma Modeling Language) is the dedicated language used in GAMA. It is an agent-based language, that provides the possibility to build a model with several paradigms of modeling. This high-level language was inspired by

Smalltalk Smalltalk is a purely object oriented programming language (OOP) that was originally created in the 1970s for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, but later found use in business. It was created at Xerox PARC by Learni ...

and

, GAMA has been developed to be used by non-computer scientists.

User interface

Modelers may use many visual representations for the same model, in order to highlight a certain aspect of a simulation. These include 2D/3D displays, with basic control of lighting, textures, and cameras. Standard charts such as series plots may also be constructed.

Project examples

The developers maintain a community-sourced list of scientific projects that use GAMA. Some of the larger efforts include: * Hoan Kiem Air: Agent based modeling and simulation of the urban management on traffic and air pollution through tangible interface. * Proxymix: Visualization tool about the influence of spatial configuration on human collaboration. * CityScope Champs-Elysées: An interactive platform to improve decision-making related to the revitalization of the Champs Élysées. * ESCAPE: A Multi-modal Urban Traffic Agent-Based Framework to Study Individual Response to Catastrophic Events. * COMOKIT: Generic model of public policies to contain the spread of COVID-19 epidemics in a city, validated on the basis of different case studies.

Users

Several academic institutions teach modeling and simulation courses based on GAMA. It is taught in the Urban Simulation class at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences, and at the University of Salzburg. It is also used and taught annually at the Multi-platform International Summer School on Agent-Based Modelling & Simulation.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gama Platform Agent-based model Pedagogic integrated development environments Simulation programming languages Agent-based programming languages Java platform Simulation software