The Potential of Object-oriented Analysis and Design for Agent-based Computational Economics

Agent-based Simulation is used for different purposes in Computer Science and Economics. While computer scientists design agents for controlling complex systems or for instilling objects with autonomy and intelligence, economists use agents for gaining a better understanding of the dynamics within economic systems. For the modelling task both communities use their specialised modelling approaches which are very different from each other. We believe that the tools used for the purpose of designing software agents have great potential to be useful for designing agent-based models to study Economics problems. In this paper, we provide some general guidance for building Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE) models using Software Engineering (SE) modelling methods. The applicability of these methods is demonstrated by studying a real-life multi-player dilemma using an ACE and SE approach.