Literature Review: GAMA

[clorton]

https://gama-platform.github.io/wiki/Tutorials

"Create an agent based SEIR disease model with 1 million agents distributed unevenly across 25 nodes with an initial outbreak of 100 agents. β and mean incubation period are inputs to the model. Run for 1 simulated year and plot the aggregated SEIR curves for the total population and the SEIR curves for each node in a 5 by 5 grid of plots."

[jonathanhhb]

Some quick reactions...

• Just asking Chat with the prompt above for a working example of what we want didn't get very far.
• Available for Ubuntu, but you have to download a .deb install of just doing an apt install (I think)
• Looks like it's very IDE-based and very GUI-based.
• A nice set of tutorials in the documentation; including a flu model from a specific city. https://gama-platform.org/wiki/LuneraysFlu
• Written in Java
• Has headless mode documented.
• Declarative interface

"GAMA is an easy-to-use..."

Everyone says that. We'll decide.

"...open source modeling and simulation environment for creating spatially explicit agent-based simulations."

OK, that seems like we need to give it a chance.

"It has been developed to be used in any application domain: urban mobility, climate change adaptation, epidemiology, ...."

OK, that's another checkbox for us.

"The generality of the agent-based approach advocated by GAMA is accompanied by a high degree of openness, which is manifested, for example, in the development of [plugins](https://gama-platform.org/wiki/InstallingPlugins#selected-plugins-provided-by-the-gama-community) designed to meet specific needs, or by the possibility of calling GAMA from other software or languages (such as R or Python)."

OK, I like plugins. And I like Python. Some people like R. Sounds good.

"This openness allows the more than 2000 users of GAMA ..."

There is some community of users. Not sure what that really means in practice.

[krosenfeld-IDM]

These are helpful notes. Can we put your name on this one 😀 ?

[jonathanhhb]

These are helpful notes. Can we put your name on this one 😀 ?

Haha. I guess so. I might pass it off to someone else though. Hit a bit of a roadblock on Linux.

[jonathanhhb]

I used wget to download the .deb file from an existing Ubuntu VM, and than installed with apt.

It wasn't at all obvious what the binary name or path was. I did an updatedb and locate gama to find out it was:

/opt/gama-platform/Gama 

/opt/gama-platform wasn't put in my path and the documentation https://gama-platform.org/wiki/Launching didn't tell me to do that.

After launching, the splashcreen stayed up in front of the first dialog which was prompting me to pick a workspace folder. I can't interact with the dialog and can't proceed with testing the app.

Might be worth continuing on Windows instead.

[krosenfeld-IDM]

Roadblock indeed. 🧱

[jonathanhhb]

OK, after rebooting my Ubuntu laptop I was able to get further. Running the luneray flu tutorials now.

(Looks a lot like my pygame ABM hello world I created late 2023.)