CSonNet: An Agent-Based Modeling Software System for Discrete Time Simulation

Abstract

Contagion dynamics on networks are used to study many problems, including disease and virus epidemics, incarceration, obesity, protests and rebellions, needle sharing in drug use, and hurricane and other natural disaster events. Simulators to study these problems range from smaller-scale serial codes to large-scale distributed systems. In recent years, Python-based simulation systems have been built. In this work, we describe a new Python-based agent-based simulator called CSonNet. It differs from codes such as Epidemics on Networks in that it performs discrete time simulations based on the graph dynamical systems formalism. CSonNet is a parallel code; it implements concurrency through an embarrassingly parallel approach of running multiple simulation instances on a user-specified number of forked processes. It has a modeling framework whereby agent models are composed using a set of pre-defined state transition rules. We provide strong-scaling performance results and case studies to illustrate its features.