Search as a Tool for Emergence
MICHAEL J. NORTH, T. R. Howe, Nick Collier, Eric R. Tatara, Jonathan Ozik, Charles M. Macal · IGI Global eBooks · 2009
Search has been recognized as an important technology for a wide range of software applications. Agentbased modelers often face search challenges both when looking for agents that need to be connected to one another and when seeking appropriate target agents while defining agent behaviors. This chapter presents an approach to simplifying such search problems and shows examples of its use. The approach presented in this chapter offers both imperative and declarative methods to find sets of agents with particular attributes in particular locales. The imperative approach allows for flexible reactions to the agents that are discovered through querying. The declarative approach builds on the imperative approach and introduces a temporal dimension to the process by explicitly allowing for searches that activate in the future depending on the conditions that obtain in a given model.