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Preface
Writing complex simulation code is an error-prone process and rarely meets
the standards required for best practice software engineering. This is true of
many Agent-based Modeling (ABM) platforms. For people to believe the results of a simulation model and the model-building process it needs to be
transparent. Journals and others are demanding much more information about
the details of the models. FLAME addresses these issues by providing a basic
notation for describing agents and a robust translation process that automatically generates executable code. FLAME was built using the latest software
engineering approaches.
At its heart, and the reason why it is so efficient and robust, is the use
of a powerful computational model ‘Communicating X-machines’ which is
general enough to cope with most types of modeling problem. As well as being
increasingly important in academic research FLAME is now being applied in
industry in many different application areas.
This book describes the basics of FLAME and is illustrated with numerous
examples.
Professor Mike Holcombe