An Actor-Based Software Framework for Developing and Simulating Complex Systems

ASiDE is an actor-based software framework that has the goals of simplifying the development of large and distributed complex systems and of guarantying an efficient execution of applications. This software framework provides a flexible actor implementation that simplifies the writing of the actors by delegating the management of events (i.e., the reception of messages) to the execution environment, and allowing the choice between an active thread solution (i.e., each actor has its own thread) and a passive thread solution (i.e., several actors share the same thread). In particular, the second thread solution is suitable to implement systems whose behavior should be modeled through the use of a large number of actors. ASiDE is currently used for proving its advantages for the development of agent based modeling and simulation tools.