NetLogo vs. Repast Simphony?

Question

I would like to simulate some scenarios using the multiagent paradigm, and it seems NetLogo and Repast are the most popular tools for that.

I'd like to know if anyone has had any experience with either one and could tell me more about them? For example, I've noticed that there is a fluxogram-like modeling option for Repast, but I believe it is rather limited. I've looked around the tutorials and documentation in the official site, and the documentation seems to be lacking. While there are some examples with it, I'd say extending it to simulate an ambient which it has not been specifically prepared to seems like an unreachable goal at the moment, despite Repast obviously being very robust and apparently able to handle it, given enough familiarity with it.

On the other hand, NetLogo has more examples and overall I've liked it more for its simplicity, but it seems to be more focused on the simulating propagation of diseases or similar models. I've found a programming book teaching Logo, so I figure it'd be easier to get started with it too.

Currently, I am thinking of simulating botnets and IDSes as multiagents. The problem, however, is that I would have to abstract the network and transport layers to an extent to be able to do it, as well as generate traffic between the nodes. Repast is apparently more fitting for this, but given its complexity and lack of documentation I'm thinking of using NetLogo. While there are some examples of NetLogo with traditional applications (ex: Tetris or Pac-Man), I'm not sure about how appropriate it'd be for that.

Answer 1

You could simulate the traffic using a agent type called "packet" that will be spawned and send from a agent called "bot" to another agent called "bot" or "server". Instead of sending the packets to a IP address, you would be sending them to a pair of X and Y coordinates.

Netlogo has an example of how a virus spreads in a network, this might be a good starting point.

Answer 2

Hey,

I had more or less the same problem a few months ago when I had to choose a framework for my simulation. I look at Repast, NetLogo, Swarm and Jade. NetLogo was nice and I tried to write some simple test applications but since I wanted to use Java as my programming language, NetLogo wasn't the best candidate. Repast has pretty much everything you need to write larger simulations and there are many projects (especially in social sciences) where Repast is used. My problems with Repasts were: bad API documentation, parameters that are passed to methods or constructers that are never used and don't make any sense at all (have a look at the source code) and a lot of boilerplate code. I'm using Jade (http://jade.tilab.com/) now and I'm really happy with it. The community is good and their mailing list is VERY active. Okay, Jade is just a library and a framework for agent-based modelling. You don't get anything like those visual editor in Repast and you'll have to write your own tool for visualising the results.

Cheers

Answer 3

Hello,

Never tried NetLogo, but have tried repast-j and simphony. It seems simphony is good, but at the moment I am stuck at changing the Edge type from straight line to curved one. Not enough documentation and examples... Once I tried mason which is based on java, too. It is similar to repast-j, yet it was faster. But recently not much development. i would like to try out jade later.

Cheers

Answer 4

I have a webpage with a couple dozed netlogo multiagent simulations. I use netlogo for teaching and I have found that, once you get past the learning curve, you can develop simulations amazingly fast. Stuff that would take you 80 man-hours in other so-called agent environments (Jade, Repast, which are really mostly just programming libraries) can be done in 2 hours.

On the other hand, netlogo is not really good for simulations that require immense amount of details, like say simulating a network all the way from TCP/IP to HTTP. That would just require large amounts of code, regardless of programming language, and netlogo currently sucks if your program ends up being more that 10 pages long. Having said that, most people would be amazed at what you can get done in 10 pages of netlogo code.