Repast is one of the leading software packages for agent-based simulation. It provides useful classes for building and controlling simulations and users can run their models using a graphic display or in batch mode. These functions are fairly straight-forward if you want to build a stand-alone Repast simulation but what if you want to integrate Repast within a larger modelling system? This tutorial will explain the problem and show a solution influenced by design patterns.
Read more on Linking Repast to another Java program…
I’m working on the conclusion chapter of my thesis at the moment. It’s meant to sum up the results presented in earlier chapters and then discuss wider questions in the literature and for policy. There are a couple ideas I’m working on, such as an ideal tariff for microgenerators and clarifying PV’s place within the context of other household energy conservation measures, but a basic concern is sorting out how PV households interact with other stakeholders within the PV industry.
Read more on Fun with Pajek…
As I was saying last time, I’ve got quite a bit of configuration data used in the model and I couldn’t figure out a good way to access it quickly and without too much coding. After the EnumMap stuff (which works fine but gets a bit cumbersome if you try and do anything to fancy), I switched to a JDBC connection to Access. Again it works fine but because of how frequently the database needs to be checked, it ends up being really slow.
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I’m making good progress on the next version of the model, adding more configuration information for the initialization of household agents. However I’m having difficulty deciding on a common file format so that I can have just one or two methods for reading in files and parsing them into appropriate input. Some of my files have two or three columns, some labelled rows, some just single numeric values. In some ways it would be easier if everything was in a database but I kind of like using text files since it’s very easy to see what’s going on, add comments and share information – everyone’s got Notepad but not everyone has the latest MySQL setup.
Read more on Data storage and manipulation…
Last week I finished the first version of my model and I’m pretty pleased with how it works so far.
There are twp issues worth noting though. JUnit was and is invaluable in developing the model but since my model uses a lot of random numbers it can be tricky to write the assert cases since you don’t know what the outcome of a particular method might be. To get around this, I’ve created dummy input files with binary (0 or 1) input data. Ordinarily these values would be a probability between 0 and 1 but with the test input, I know definitely what the model is doing at any stage.
Read more on Version 0.3 finished…
I’ve been trying to figure out how to model load profiles for different appliances. There are a few different approaches but the most sensible approach begins by assuming that, for an appliance to be used:
Read more on Modelling load profiles…
