SOIL

Soil is an extensible and user-friendly Agent-based Social Simulator for Social Networks. Learn how to run your own simulations with our documentation.

Follow our tutorial to develop your own agent models.

Changes in version 0.3

Version 0.3 came packed with many changes to provide much better integration with MESA. For a long time, we tried to keep soil backwards-compatible, but it turned out to be a big endeavour and the resulting code was less readable. This translates to harder maintenance and a worse experience for newcomers. In the end, we decided to make some breaking changes.

If you have an older Soil simulation, you have two options:

• Update the necessary configuration files and code. You may use the examples in the examples folder for reference, as well as the documentation.
• Keep using a previous soil version.

Mesa compatibility

Soil is in the process of becoming fully compatible with MESA. The idea is to provide a set of modular classes and functions that extend the functionality of mesa, whilst staying compatible. In the end, it should be possible to add regular mesa agents to a soil simulation, or use a soil agent within a mesa simulation/model.

This is a non-exhaustive list of tasks to achieve compatibility:

• Integrate soil.Simulation with mesa's runners:
  • soil.Simulation could mimic/become a mesa.batchrunner
• Integrate soil.Environment with mesa.Model:
  • Soil.Environment inherits from mesa.Model
  • Soil.Environment includes a Mesa-like Scheduler (see the soil.time module.
  • Allow for mesa.Model to be used in a simulation.
• Integrate soil.Agent with mesa.Agent:
  • Rename agent.id to unique_id?
  • mesa agents can be used in soil simulations (see examples/mesa)
• Provide examples
  • Using mesa modules in a soil simulation
  • Using soil modules in a mesa simulation
• Document the new APIs and usage

Citation

If you use Soil in your research, don't forget to cite this paper:

@inbook{soil-gsi-conference-2017,
    author = "S{\'a}nchez, Jes{\'u}s M. and Iglesias, Carlos A. and S{\'a}nchez-Rada, J. Fernando",
    booktitle = "Advances in Practical Applications of Cyber-Physical Multi-Agent Systems: The PAAMS Collection",
    doi = "10.1007/978-3-319-59930-4_19",
    editor = "Demazeau Y., Davidsson P., Bajo J., Vale Z.",
    isbn = "978-3-319-59929-8",
    keywords = "soil;social networks;agent based social simulation;python",
    month = "June",
    organization = "PAAMS 2017",
    pages = "234-245",
    publisher = "Springer Verlag",
    series = "LNAI",
    title = "{S}oil: {A}n {A}gent-{B}ased {S}ocial {S}imulator in {P}ython for {M}odelling and {S}imulation of {S}ocial {N}etworks",
    url = "https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-59930-4_19",
    volume = "10349",
    year = "2017",
}

@Copyright GSI - Universidad Politécnica de Madrid 2017-2021