Turtles as State Machines

NetLogo is an excellent platform independent environment for modelling social and natural phenomena as multi-agent systems with a great number of agents. The NetLogo platform was developed by Uri Wilensky in 1999 and is under continuous development at the CCL.  

Although the platform offers support for reactive agent systems, modelling more complex agents is somewhat hard. The TSTATES DSL tries to extend NetLogo by providing a domain specific language to facilitate encoding and execution of agents (turtles) using state machines. TSTATES works with NetLogo version 5.0 and above, since it heavily depends on the notion of Tasks.

TSTATES DSL Code and Manual

The nls file for the DSL can be found here. This has to be "included" in your nlogo file to use TSTATES. It is in a stable form, but new features are under development as a number of extensions that are planned for implementation. The TSTATES Manual describes how to use the DSL in your models.

Simulation Scenarios using TSTATES

All the necessary files for runnig the simulation scenarios are included in a corresponding zip file. Simply download, unzip and run in NetLogo vesrion 5 and above.

The first two scenarios are described in the ICAART 2012 paper that follows and are an implementation of the DMARS explorer described by Steels.

• A simple MARS agents scenario without cooperation bewteen agents that presents a congestion problem when the number of agents operating in the environment increases.
• A cooperative agents scenario that avoids congestion phenomena described in the paper.
  • Running the second example requires that you also download the code for communication. This is a modified version of the FIPA ACL library found elsewhere in this site (included in the zip file).

The following scenarios are described in the SIMULTECH paper found below. The underground Station simulation demonstrates all the features of the TSTATES DSL.

• The Termites Model originally found in the NetLogo model library and adopted to the TSTATES library.
• The The Underground Station Simulation a crowd simulation scenario.

Relevant Publications

(In case you have used and want to refer to the work presented above)

1. Ilias Sakellariou, " Turtles as State Machines", in Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence ( ICAART 2012), Volume 2, pages 373-378 Villamoura Portugal, Feb 2012. (pdf)
2. Ilias Sakellariou, " Agent Based Modelling and Simulation Using State Machines", in Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Simulation and Modeling Methodologies, Technologies and Applications ( SIMULTECH 2012 ), Rome, Italy, Jul 2012. (pdf)

Other Links

• The NetLogo Platform.
• The excellent Jose Vidal's page with NetLogo Models.

---

For further questions, comments, suggestions, bug reports etc. please contact: Ilias Sakellariou

---