Large-Scale Agent-Based Simulations
Research | Publications | Funding
Research
As we acquire an increasing amount of information on the physical
world, we have the opportunity to develop new methods for analyzing
it, and to develop new simulation models that can
capture the underlying properties that shape large-scale, long-term
processes such as transportation, pollution, and the impact of new
technologies or policy decisions on our environment. This is particularly
true in the transportation domain. The interesting
challenge here is that much work in science and engineering has
developed sophisticated methods for either (1) handling the complex,
detailed questions concerned with small or moderate-sized
micro-simulations (in the tens, hundreds, or small number of thousands
of simulated entities), or (2) handling questions at the aggregate
level concerned with macro-simulations where higher-level concepts
such as flows abstract away individual simulated entities (SEs),
enabling simulations of much larger phenomena. Historically, scaling
up micro-simulations to address detailed questions about large-scale
transportation systems, when feasible at all, has required
supercomputer-class facilities and much specialized hand-optimization
of the code.
Our research makes a first step towards tackling the grand challenge of truly scalable transportation micro-simulations. We take the computational ideas that allow database systems to scale to petabytes and apply them to the programming and processing of large-scale transportation micro-simulations. Thus, the use of our computer science techniques will enable detailed simulations on a standard cloud computing infrastructure (a shared nothing cluster) with SEs numbering in the tens of thousands to millions. In particular, we will enable scalable declarative processing of such transportation simulations, which will enable us to use optimizations from databases such as set-at-a-time processing, indexing, and parallel processing. Our declarative processing model does not come with a declarative programming model, but instead allows transportation simulation designers to stay in a traditional imperative programming model as long as they follow certain high-level program design patterns. Thus we use computational ways of thinking about transportation simulations that are only subtly different from existing ways of programming transportation simulations, but that enable researchers to perform transportation micro-simulations at scales that were never imagined before.
Publications
See All Publications in Games and Simulations
- Benjamin Sowell, Alan Demers, Johannes Gehrke, Nitin Gupta, Haoyuan Li, and Walker White, From Declarative Languages to Declarative Processing in Computer Games. In Proc. of the 2009 CIDR Conf. on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR 2009).
- Walker White, Benjamin Sowell, Johannes Gehrke, and Alan Demers, Declarative Processing for Computer Games. In Proc. of the 2008 ACM SIGGRAPH Sandbox Symposium (Sandbox 2008).
- Walker White, Alan Demers, Christoph Koch, Johannes Gehrke, and Rajmohan Rajagopalan. Scaling Games to Epic Proportions. In Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2007).
Funding
This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant IIS-0725260, by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and by a grant from Microsoft. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.