Moduleco
3 -Concepts of the Framework
3.2.2. Medium
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Medium : a link between agents, and a way to formalise their interactions

Information & Communication : Medium & institutional structure

the NeighbourBuilder builds the neighbourhood of each agent ; for example : 

WorldZone  NeighbourVonNeuman  NeighbourMoore BoundedRandomZone
neighbourg.jpg (19697 octets)



Mediums are abstractions that define how agents interact and how they are connected together. A single subclass exists in the framework - but some other subclasses are defined for specific models without being general enough to be integrated yet in the framework - NeighbourMedium. NeighbourMedium allows Moduleco to define the set of neighbours an agent can have. Once its neighbourhood defined, an agent can invoke the services of its neighbours (get state information for instance).

Neighbours are built using subclasses of ZoneSelector such as WorldZone (all agents in the grid), NeighbourVonNeuman (North, South, East and West agents of the current one), NeighbourMoore (the 8 closest agents in the grid). In fact the topology is defined by the Neighbourhood. The grid is just an easy way to represent agents on a screen (that is offered by default, but that can be changed...as usual).

Until now all models used an invariant neighbourhood all along the simulation, but it is accepted by the framework that an agent add or remove another agent from its neighbours - under its responsibility !

In order to interconnect Agents,  the method connect() is defined in EWorld. It already has some current implementations that can be reused but that one can redefine if necessary in new specialized World class.

Denis.Phan@enst-bretagne.fr ;  Antoine Beugnard@enst-bretagne.fr