Supporting the exploratory nature of simulations in D-Mason

Agent-Based Models (ABM) are a class of models which, by simulating the behaviors of multiple agents (i.e., independent actions, interactions and adaptation), aims to emulate and/or predict complex phenomena. The "emergence" of such complex phenomena is often computation intensive and requires tools, libraries and frameworks, capable of speeding up and facilitate the design of complex simulations. In this paper we present new developments on that is a distributed version of a well-known and popular library for writing and running Agent-based Simulations. The new developments are: a) a tool that allows the parallel exploration of the behavior parameter space; b) an infrastructure that improves the management of distributed simulations in terms of easy deployment of new simulations, automatic update, versioning control and distributed logging. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.