About Agent Based Modeling

About Mesa

The front page says somewhere that

Mesa is an an agent-based modeling framework for Python.

So what does that mean?

Agent-Based Modeling

An agent-based model (ABM) is a model or simulation of a system which is composed of multiple agents which interact with one another. Agents are the individual actors in the system: they may represent animals, people, robots, organizations, even entire countries. The model encodes certain rules for how agents behave, interact with one another and with their environment, how they make decisions, and how they change over time.

For example, think of modeling the spread of an epidemic. A mathematical model might use a system of differential equations to describe how the percents of the population susceptible to the disease, already infected, and recovered (or removed) vary with time and influence one another. For example, the model might specify how the current fraction of the population that's infected determines the rate of new infections. However, the model can't say anything about a particular individual; only what fraction of the overall population fall into which category at any given time.

In contrast, an agent-based model might consist of individual, simulated agents