is a fully visual platform for developing agent-based simulations. A modeler uses the visual language to define agent, resource classes as well as the world using a systematic specification language. The specification language has the full power of a programming language and allows to define complex agent decision making. When running a simulation, this model and configuration settings are interpreted in a time-stepped way to produce simulation results. SeSAm was originally intended to enable domain experts to create agent-based simulation models without a modeling expert doing the actual model design and implementation. It turned out to be a convenient fast prototyping tool for modeling experts in addition. It’s plugin mechanism makes it very flexible, as easily adapted to a particular domain – but full language expressiveness is just a click away. SeSAm is an open source tool. Sources are accessible via Bitbucket. Contact Franziska, if you want to access the sources.
Development of SeSAm started in 1995, when Franziska started her PhD Thesis work at the University of Würzburg in Germany. She finished a first LISP-based version of SeSAm as part of her PhD thesis in 2000. In the following years, the group working with SeSAm grew and we had the opportunity to re-design and re-implement the system based on JAVA with all the experiences we made applying SeSAm ourselves and supporting others developing agent-based simulation studies using SeSAm. Christoph Oechslein and Rainer Herrler were not just wonderful PhD students, but are extremely talented software engineers. They did a large part of the design and implementation then. In 2008, Franziska moved to Örebro University, Sweden, where we – especially Robert Junges in his PhD thesis – extended SeSAm with learning-based agent architectures. Today, SeSAm is intensively used in our research and education. Due to restricted resources supporting external users, we reduced marketing SeSAm. Nevertheless, SeSAm is working, it can be downloaded, installed and used. There are tutorials and a bit of documentation. We are happy to answer questions and are available for partners in research projects!