MASON : A Multi-Agent Simulation Environment

We introduce MASON, a fast, easily extensible, discrete-event multi-agent simulation toolkit in Java. MASON was designed to serve as the basis for a wide range of multiagent simulation tasks ranging from swarm robotics to machine learning to social complexity environments. MASON carefully delineates between model and visualization, allowing models to be dynamically detached from or attached to visualizers, and to change platforms mid-run. We describe the MASON system, its motivation, and its basic architectural design. We then compare MASON to related multi-agent libraries in the public domain, and discuss six applications of the system we have built over the past year to suggest its breadth of utility.