What this is all about

Agents is a tool for simulating dynamics of selfish users in traffic networks like the Internet. Classical Game Theory has been extensively used to analyse the Internet. However, this analysis is limited to static properties of such models, e.g. equilibria, the price of anarchy, etc. We are interested in dynamical properties. Therefore we apply methods from Evolutionary Game Theory to networks. The behaviour of agents is simulated by continuous or discrete processes, the best-known of which is the so-called replicator dynamics.

With Agents you can

• model networks and latency functions,
• find numerical solutions to these dynamics using the Runge-Kutta method,
• plot various time dependent data, like potential functions, e.g. the well known Rosenthal function, etc.
• numerically find equilibria,
• export and import graphs as xml documents (GraphML),
• export gnuplot,
• and more.

Requirements and download

The easiest way to start Agents is using Java Web Start. Try clicking on the link in the navigation bar on the left. There is also an applet version available.

Both the Java sources and an executable jar file can be downloaded from Sourceforge. The most recent version can also be checked out by anonymous CVS.

Agents requires a running Java Runtime Environment (JRE) which is available from Sun for almost all platforms. If you want to compile Agents yourself, you need the Java Development Kit (JDK), and, possibly, Ant.