Agent Based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS) is demonstrating a new and powerful way for the analysis and the modeling of systems which is able to fully represent a system at different levels of complexity in terms of autonomous, goal-driven and interacting entities (agents) organized in societies. This mindset is particularly appropriate for modeling social and economic systems as they are naturally composed of interacting entities and exhibit emergent properties, that is, properties which arise from the interactions of the entities that cannot be deduced simply by aggregating the properties of the entities themselves. The agent-based model of a system is, then, executed to simulate the behavior of the complete system so that the knowledge of the behaviors of the single entities (micro-level) can produce an understanding of the overall system-level outcomes (macro-level).  To date, although several tools for ABMS are available, well defined and integrated processes, which cover all the phases from the analysis of the system under consideration to its modeling and simulation analysis, are lacking. Moreover, the absence of visual modeling tools and techniques for ABMS often constitutes an entry barrier for whoever has not advanced programming skills.

To address these issues, this paper proposes an integrated and iterative process for agent-based modeling and simulation of social and economic systems which supports scientists in fully exploiting benefits of the ABMS and significantly reduces programming and implementation efforts. The proposed process covers all the following phases:

• System Analysis, in which a preliminary understanding of the system and the main simulation objectives are obtained;
• Conceptual System Modeling, whose result is a model of the system in terms of agents, artifacts and societies;
• Simulation Design, in which it is defined a model of the system in terms of the abstractions offered by the framework exploited for the simulation;
• Simulation Code Generation, in which the simulation code for the target simulation environment is automatically generated starting from the models obtained in the previous phase;
• Simulation Set-up, in which the simulation scenarios are set;
• Simulation Execution and Results Analysis, in which the simulation results are analyzed with reference to the objectives of the simulation individuated in the System Analysis phase.

In particular, the simulation phases exploit the Repast Simphony Toolkit, which is the most popular ABMS toolkit and the only one which provides advanced features of visual modeling of the agent behaviors and (semi)automatic code generation; moreover, for the Result Analysis phase it is possible an integrated use of several powerful analysis tools (Matlab, R, VisAd, iReport, Jung).

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