Object Oriented Simulation With Hierarchical Modular Models: Intelligent Agents and Endomorphic Systems

VERY GOOD

An amazing work about how agent based simulations should be planned, and how the communication between the components flows -- Bálint Fazekas, Attila Kiss in Intelligent Systems and Applications (2020)The publication is a third book from a series by the same author. Although the reader will profit from studying the previous two books "Theory of modelling and simulation" [New York (1976; Zbl 0352.68122)] "Multifacetted modelling and discrete simulation" (Academic Press, 1984), they are not absolutely essential for understanding this publication.The main objective of the book is to describe the so called DEVS-scheme, which is a formalism developed for specification of hierarchical and modular discrete event simulation models, and to show how this scheme can be used for the development of complex models. The principles of the DEVS scheme which are based on object-oriented approach to model elements and parts, are mainly explained in various examples and their systematic definition is only briefly reviewed. The book is not a detailed manual for DEVS (the author states this specifically) and is mainly aimed at suggesting practical ways of algorithmic construction and computer implementation of model concepts discussed in the previous books.The content of the book is divided into 14 chapters, epilogue, and 2 appendices. The first chapter reviews briefly the ideas of knowledge representation in simulation environment, which were explored in the previous book. The second chapter overviews the concepts of object oriented programming and outlines their use in model development. The third chapter shortly recapitulates the DEVS formalism and its use for model specification.The following 12 chapters describe applications of the DEVS strategy for solving different modelling problems. The subject of these problems and their ordering have beeen carefully selected creating a series starting from simple issues and continuing with more and more complex subjects. The final chapters in this series deal with models based on knowledge representation and artificial intelligence.Reviewer: M.Malik