Towards an Emergence-Driven Software Process for Agent-Based Simulation

Abstract. In this paper we propose an emergence-driven software process for agent-based simulation that clarifies the traceability of micro and macro observations to micro and macro specifications in agent-based models. We use the concept of hyperstructures [1] to illustrate how micro and macro specifications interact in agent-based models, and show that the reductionism/non-reductionism debate is important to understand the reliability of agent-based simulations. In particular, we show that the effort expended in the verification of agent-based simulations increases exponentially with the number of micro and macro specifications, and that the reliability assessment of non-anticipated results in simulation is in practice not possible. According to these results we claim that it is impossible in practice to verify that an agentbased conceptual model has been implemented properly as a computational model, since we do not usually know what we want the output to be a priori. We thus advocate that the classic process of verification, validation and exploration of non-anticipated results is not reliable in agent-based simulation, and call into question the applicability of traditional software engineering methods to agent-based simulation.