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The purpose of this paper is to present a new approach to ecological model calibration -- an agent-based software. This agent works on three stages: 1- It builds a matrix that synthesizes the inter-variable relationships; 2- It analyses the steady-state sensitivity of different variables to different parameters; 3- It runs the model iteratively and measures model lack of fit, adequacy and reliability. Stage 3 continues until some convergence criteria are attained. At each iteration, the agent knows from stages 1 and 2, which parameters are most likely to produce the desired shift on predicted results.
Advances in healthcare and in the quality of life significantly increase human life expectancy. With the ageing of populations, new un-faced challenges are brought to science. The human body is naturally selected to be well-functioning until the age of reproduction to keep the species alive. However, as the lifespan extends, unseen problems due to the body deterioration emerge. There are several age-related diseases with no appropriate treatment; therefore, the complex ageing phenomena needs further understanding. Immunosenescence, the ageing of the immune system, is highly correlated to the negative effects of ageing, such as the increase of auto-inflammatory diseases and decrease in responsiveness to new diseases. Besides clinical and mathematical tools, we believe there is opportunity to further exploit simulation tools to understand immunosenescence. Compared to real-world experimentation, benefits include time and cost effectiveness due to the laborious, resource-intensiveness of the biological environment and the possibility of conducting experiments without ethic restrictions. Contrasted with mathematical models, simulation modelling is more suitable for representing complex systems and emergence. In addition, there is the belief that simulation models are easier to communicate in interdisciplinary contexts. Our work investigates the usefulness of simulations to understand immunosenescence by employing two different simulation methods, agent-based and system dynamics simulation, to a case study of immune cells depletion with age.
This paper presents a distributed, efficient, scalable and real-time motion planning algorithm for a large group of agents moving in 2 or 3-dimensional spaces. This algorithm enables autonomous agents to generate individual trajectories independently with only the relative position information of neighboring agents. Each agent applies a force-based control that contains two main terms: collision avoidance and navigational feedback. The first term keeps two agents separate with a certain distance, while the second term attracts each agent toward its goal location. Compared with existing collision-avoidance algorithms, the proposed force-based motion planning (FMP) algorithm is able to find collision-free motions with lower transition time, free from velocity state information of neighbouring agents. It leads to less computational overhead. The performance of proposed FMP is examined over several dense and complex 2D and 3D benchmark simulation scenarios, with results outperforming existing methods.
We consider the optimal coverage problem where a multi-agent network is deployed in an environment with obstacles to maximize a joint event detection probability. The objective function of this problem is non-convex and no global optimum is guaranteed by gradient-based algorithms developed to date. We first show that the objective function is monotone submodular, a class of functions for which a simple greedy algorithm is known to be within 0.63 of the optimal solution. We then derive two tighter lower bounds by exploiting the curvature information (total curvature and elemental curvature) of the objective function. We further show that the tightness of these lower bounds is complementary with respect to the sensing capabilities of the agents. The greedy algorithm solution can be subsequently used as an initial point for a gradient-based algorithm to obtain solutions even closer to the global optimum. Simulation results show that this approach leads to significantly better performance relative to previously used algorithms.
The ability to create artificial intelligence (AI) capable of performing complex tasks is rapidly outpacing our ability to ensure the safe and assured operation of AI-enabled systems. Fortunately, a landscape of AI safety research is emerging in response to this asymmetry and yet there is a long way to go. In particular, recent simulation environments created to illustrate AI safety risks are relatively simple or narrowly-focused on a particular issue. Hence, we see a critical need for AI safety research environments that abstract essential aspects of complex real-world applications. In this work, we introduce the AI safety TanksWorld as an environment for AI safety research with three essential aspects: competing performance objectives, human-machine teaming, and multi-agent competition. The AI safety TanksWorld aims to accelerate the advancement of safe multi-agent decision-making algorithms by providing a software framework to support competitions with both system performance and safety objectives. As a work in progress, this paper introduces our research objectives and learning environment with reference code and baseline performance metrics to follow in a future work.
An agent-based model with interacting low frequency liquidity takers inter-mediated by high-frequency liquidity providers acting collectively as market makers can be used to provide realistic simulated price impact curves. This is possible when agent-based model interactions occur asynchronously via order matching using a matching engine in event time to replace sequential calendar time market clearing. Here the matching engine infrastructure has been modified to provide a continuous feed of order confirmations and updates as message streams in order to conform more closely to live trading environments. The resulting trade and quote message data from the simulations are then aggregated, calibrated and visualised. Various stylised facts are presented along with event visualisations and price impact curves. We argue that additional realism in modelling can be achieved with a small set of agent parameters and simple interaction rules once interactions are reactive, asynchronous and in event time. We argue that the reactive nature of market agents may be a fundamental property of financial markets and when accounted for can allow for parsimonious modelling without recourse to additional sources of noise.