Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) has gained significant traction due to its ability to represent diverse agents’ behaviors and interactions accurately. However, ensuring the reliability and widespread acceptance of ABM necessitates rigorous validation. Unfortunately, existing literature often lacks integration of representative validation methods into a cohesive framework, hindering standardized validation practices. This study aims at proposing a comprehensive and pragmatic validation framework. Initially, we clarify three fundamental concepts: calibration, verification, and validation. Subsequently, we review 17 distinct validation approaches and categorize them based on their data requirements and suitability for various simulation methodologies. Aligned with the ABM procedures, we introduce a Hierarchical ABM Validation (HAV) framework structured across three tiers: agent level, model level, and output level. Each tier recommends appropriate validation methods contingent upon data availability, enhancing the HAV’s applicability across diverse modeling scenarios. Finally, we develop an accessible Python code package (hav) and provide two examples of validating a traffic model and a wealth model. These cases exemplify the HAV’s implementation and underscore its efficacy in promoting standardized validation practices within ABM research.

With the increasing frequency and severity of flood events worldwide, the need for flood simulations has become more critical than ever, together with the communication of predicted hazards and possible mitigation measures. Since this communication frequently relies on static cartographic representations, it falls short in communicating complex spatial and temporal information and the intricate dynamics of flooding in an engaging and accessible manner. This limitation becomes particularly apparent when addressing diverse audiences with varying levels of expertise. This article presents an approach that uses interactive geospatial stories to better communicate various aspects of flood management strategies. Our method integrates geospatial visualization with interactive storytelling techniques, creating a compelling platform for engaging stakeholders, fostering understanding and supporting participatory decision-making in flood-prone regions. We discuss the conceptual model, the principles of guided information visualization, and interaction modalities of our web-based, scenario-driven storytelling application. We also evaluate its effectiveness through two exemplary interactive geospatial stories designed to help domain experts explain different aspects of water-sensitive design practices and the use of simulation models for predicting, visualizing, and managing water flows.

Simulation cloning is a technique in which cloned simulations whose state spaces differ partially from their parent simulation due to intervening events are spawned at runtime and concurrently advanced. It is a powerful method to carry out what-if analysis by speculatively exploring and evaluating the impact of various permutations of intervening cascade of events. Due to the exponential growth in the number of possible clones even for a small number of distinct intervening events, the practical efficacy of the approach is often severely limited by the maximum available memory of the computing host. In this paper, we introduce a novel speculative simulation cloning framework that executes a simulation cloning campaign capable of efficiently exploring an exponentially large space of clone simulations created by permutation of intervening events under a finite memory constraint. We provide a theoretical analysis of the runtime characteristics of our proposed approach and highlight its novel advantages such as memory-aware and as-long-as-needed execution. In support of our analytical findings and to demonstrate its practical feasibility, we implement a prototype of the cloning framework on a shared memory system and report its performance characteristics in the context of a heat diffusion simulation, and a power grid simulation subject to cascading disruptions from geomagnetic disturbances.

Randomized quasi-Monte Carlo methods have been introduced with the main purpose of yielding a computable measure of error for quasi-Monte Carlo approximations through the implicit application of a central limit theorem over independent randomizations. But to increase precision for a given computational budget, the number of independent randomizations is usually set to a small value so that a large number of points are used from each randomized low-discrepancy sequence to benefit from the fast convergence rate of quasi-Monte Carlo. While a central limit theorem has been previously established for a specific but computationally expensive type of randomization, it is also known in general that fixing the number of randomizations and increasing the length of the sequence used for quasi-Monte Carlo can lead to a non-Gaussian limiting distribution. This paper presents sufficient conditions on the relative growth rates of the number of randomizations and the quasi-Monte Carlo sequence length to ensure a central limit theorem and also an asymptotically valid confidence interval. We obtain several results based on the Lindeberg condition for triangular arrays and expressed in terms of the regularity of the integrand and the convergence speed of the quasi-Monte Carlo method. We also analyze the resulting estimator’s convergence rate.

This is Part 2 of a trio of works intended to provide a unifying framework in which conservative and optimistic synchronization for parallel discrete event simulations can be freely and transparently combined in the same logical process on an event-by-event basis. In this article, we continue the outline of an approach called Unified Virtual Time (UVT) that was introduced in Part 1 , showing in detail via two extended examples how conservative synchronization can be refactored and combined with optimistic synchronization in the UVT framework. We describe UVT versions of both a basic time windowing algorithm called Unified Simple Time Windows and a refactored version of the Chandy-Misra-Bryant Null Message algorithm called Unified CMB .

Stable simulation of conservation laws, such as those used to model fluid dynamics and plasma physics applications, requires the satisfaction of the so-called Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition. By allowing regions of the mesh to advance with different timesteps that locally satisfy this stability constraint, significant work reduction can be attained when compared to a time integration scheme using a single timestep size. However, parallelizing this algorithm presents considerable difficulty. Since the stability condition depends on the state of the system, dependencies become dynamic and potentially non-local. In this article, we present an adaptive local timestepping algorithm using an optimistic (Timewarp-based) parallel discrete event simulation. We introduce waiting heuristics to limit misspeculation and a semi-static load balancing scheme to eliminate load imbalance as parts of the mesh require finer or coarser timesteps. Last, we outline an interface for separating the physics of the specific conservation law from the temporal integration allowing for productive adoption of our proposed algorithm. We present a misspeculation study for three conservation laws, demonstrating both the productivity of the local timestepping API, for which 74% of the lines of code are reused across different conservation laws, and the robustness of the waiting heuristics—at most 1.5% of element updates are rolled back. Our performance studies demonstrate up to a 2.8× speedup versus a baseline unoptimized local timestepping approach, a 4x improvement in per-node throughput compared to an MPI parallelization of synchronous timestepping, and scalability up to 3,072 cores on NERSC’s Cori Haswell partition.

Data-driven crowd modeling has now become a popular and effective approach for generating realistic crowd simulation and has been applied to a range of applications, such as anomaly detection and game design. In the past decades, a number of data-driven crowd modeling techniques have been proposed, providing many options for people to generate virtual crowd simulation. This article provides a comprehensive survey of these state-of-the-art data-driven modeling techniques. We first describe the commonly used datasets for crowd modeling. Then, we categorize and discuss the state-of-the-art data-driven crowd modeling methods. After that, data-driven crowd model validation techniques are discussed. Finally, six promising future research topics of data-driven crowd modeling are discussed.

We describe a practical two-stage algorithm, BootComp, for multi-objective optimization via simulation. Our algorithm finds a subset of good designs that a decision-maker can compare to identify the one that works best when considering all aspects of the system, including those that cannot be modeled. BootComp is designed to be straightforward to implement by a practitioner with basic statistical knowledge in a simulation package that does not support sequential ranking and selection. These requirements restrict us to a two-stage procedure that works with any distributions of the outputs and allows for the use of common random numbers. Comparisons with sequential ranking and selection methods suggest that it performs well, and we also demonstrate its use analyzing a real simulation aiming to determine the optimal ward configuration for a UK hospital.

Markov automata are a compositional modelling formalism with continuous stochastic time, discrete probabilities, and nondeterministic choices. In this article, we present extensions to M ODEST , an expressive high-level language with roots in process algebra, that allow large Markov automata models to be specified in a succinct, modular way. We illustrate the advantages of M ODEST over alternative languages. Model checking Markov automata models requires dedicated algorithms for time-bounded and long-run average reward properties. We describe and evaluate the state-of-the-art algorithms implemented in the mcsta model checker of the M ODEST T OOLSET . We find that mcsta improves the performance and scalability of Markov automata model checking compared to earlier and alternative tools. We explain a partial-exploration approach based on the BRTDP method designed to mitigate the state space explosion problem of model checking, and experimentally evaluate its effectiveness. This problem can be avoided entirely by purely simulation-based techniques, but the nondeterminism in Markov automata hinders their straightforward application. We explain how lightweight scheduler sampling can make simulation possible, and provide a detailed evaluation of its usefulness on several benchmarks using the M ODEST T OOLSET ’s modes simulator.