On the acceleration of spatially distributed agent-based computations: A patch dynamics scheme

摘要: In recent years, individual-based/agent-based modeling has been applied to study a wide range of applications, ranging from engineering problems to phenomena in sociology, economics and biology. Simulating such agent-based models over extended spatiotemporal domains can be prohibitively expensive due to stochasticity and the presence of multiple scales. Nevertheless, many agent-based problems exhibit smooth behavior in space and time on a macroscopic scale, suggesting that a useful coarse-grained continuum model could be obtained. For such problems, the equation-free framework [16], [17], [18] can significantly reduce the computational cost. Patch dynamics is an essential component of this framework. This scheme is designed to perform numerical simulations of an unavailable macroscopic equation on macroscopic time and length scales; it uses appropriately initialized simulations of the fine …