Distributed MASON: A scalable distributed multi-agent simulation environment

Computational Social Science (CSS) involves interdisciplinary fields and exploits computational methods, such as social network analysis as well as computer simulation with the goal of better understanding social phenomena. Agent-Based Models (ABMs) represent an effective research tool for CSS and consist of a class of models, which, aim to emulate or predict complex phenomena through a set of simple rules (i.e., independent actions, interactions and adaptation), performed by multiple agents. The efficiency and scalability of ABMs systems are typically obtained distributing the overall computation on several machines, which interact with each other in order to simulate a specific model. Unfortunately, the design of a distributed simulation model is particularly challenging, especially for domain experts who sporadically are computer scientists and are not used to developing parallel code. D-MASON framework is a distributed version of the MASON library for designing and executing ABMs in a distributed environment ensuring scalability and easiness. D-MASON enable the developer to exploit the computing power of distributed environment in a transparent manner; the developer has to do simple incremental modifications to existing MASON models, without re-designing them. This paper presents several novel features and architectural improvements introduced in the D-MASON framework: an improved space partitioning strategy, a distributed 3D field, a distributed network field, a decentralized communication layer, a novel memory consistency mechanism and the integration to cloud environments. Full documentation, additional tutorials, and other material can be found at https://github.com/isislab-unisa/dmason where the framework can be downloaded.